| I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. |
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| Tropic of Cancer quotes |
[28 Nov 2008|10:55pm] |
Tropic of Cancer
by Henry Miller
with introduction by Karl Shapiro
and preface by Anais Nin (but supposidly actually written by Henry Miller himself)
Introduction
"it is poetry only because it rises above literature and because it sometimes ends up in bibles"
"Let's assemble a bible from his work, I said, and put one in every hotel room in America, after removing the Gideon Bibles and placing them in the laundry chutes"
"We can call Miller the greatest living Patagonian."
"The fact is that there isn't any subject and Miller is its poet."
"I have often thought that the Germans make the best Americans, though they certainly make the worst Germans."
"Morally I regard Miller as a holy man, as most of his adherents do---Ghandi with a penis."
"he is screamingly funny without making fun of sex"
"There is only one aim in life and that is to live it. In America it has become impossible, except for a few lucky or wise people, to live one's life; consequently the poets and artists tend to move to the fringes of society."
""The world problem is the individual problem; if the individual is at peace, has happiness, has great tolerance, and an intense desire to help, then the world problem as such ceases to exist. You consider the world problem before you have considered your own problem. Before you have established peace and understanding in your own hearts and in your own minds you desire to establish peace and tranquility in the minds of others, in your nations and in your states; whereas peace and understanding only come when there is understanding; certainy and strength in yourselves (Krishnamurti (Miller?))""
""We create our fate," says Miller. And better still: "Forget, forgive, renounce, abdicate." And "scrap the past instantly." Live the good life instantly; it's now or never, and always has been."
""How can one know the splendor and fullness of youth if one's energies are consumed in combating the errors and falsities of parents and ancestors? Is youth to waste its strength unlocking the grip of death? Is youth's only mission on earth to rebel, to destroy, to assassinate? Is youth only to be offered up as a sacrifice? What of the dreams of youth? Are they always to be regarded as follies? Are they to be populated only with chimeras? ...Stifle or deform youth's dreams and you destroy the creator (Miller).""
Preface
"The book is sustained on its own axis by the pure flux and roation of events. Just as there is no central point, so also there is no question of heroism or of strugle since there is no question of will, but only as obedience to flow."
"The humilations and defeats, given with a primitive honesty, end not in frustration, despair, or futility, but in hunger, an ecstatic, devouring hunger---for more life"
"If there is here revealed the capacity to shock, to startle the lifeless ones from their profound slumber, let us congratulate ourselves; for the tragedy of our world is precisely that nothing any longer is capable of rousing it from its lethargy. No more violent dreams, no refreshment, no awakening. In the anaesthesai produced by self-knowledge, life is passing, art is passing, slipping from us: we are drifting with time and our fight is with shadows. We need a blood transfusion."
Tropic of Cancer
"We are are allone here and we are dead (1)."
"The weather will continue bad, he says. There will be more calamities, more death, more despair. Not the slightest indication of a change anywhere. The cancer of time is eating us away. Our heroes have killed themselves, or are killing themselves. The hero, then, is not Time, but Timelessness. We must get in step, a lock steop, toward the prison of death. There is no escape. The weather will not change (1)."
"I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive (1)."
"This then? This is not a book. This is a libel, sladner, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this ia prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty...what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing. I will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse....
To sing you must first open your mouth. You must have a pair of lungs, and a little knowledge of music. It is not necessary to have an accordion, or guitar. The essential thing is to want to sing. This then is a song. I am singing (2)"
"There are intervals, but they are between dreams, and there is no consciousness of them left. The world around me is dissolving, leaving here and there spots of time. The world is a cancer eating itself away...I am thinking that when the great silence descends upon all and everywhere musicl will at last triumph. When into the womb of time everything is again withdrawn chaos will be restored and chaos is the score upon which reality is written (2)."
"...your womb turned inside out (5)."
"ovaries incandescent (5)."
"I am a sentient being stabbed by the miracle of these waters that reflect a forgotten world (6)."
"I am suffocated by it. No one to whom I can communicate evern a fraction of my feelings... (6)."
"She used candles, Roman candles, and door knobs (7)."
"We have so many points in common that it is like loking at myself in a cracked mirror (9)."
"I recall distrinctly how I enjoyed my suffering. It was like taking a cub to bed with you. Once in a while he clawed you---and then you really were frightened. Ordinarily you had no fear---you could always turn him loose, or chop his head off (9)."
"It seems whenever I go there is drama. People are like lice---they get uner your skin and bury themselves there. You scratch and scratch until the blood comes, but you can't get permanently deloused. Everywhere I go people are making a mess of their lives. Everyone has his private tragedy. It's in the blood now---misfortune, ennui, grief, suicide. The atmosphere is saturated with disaster, frustration, futility. Scratch and scratch---until there's no skin left. However, the effect upon me is exhilarating. Instaed of being discouraged, or depressed, I enjoy it. I am crying for more and more disasters, for bigger calamities, for grander failures. I want the whole world to be out of whack, I want everyone to scratch himself to death (12)."
"...about the women who look so attractive from behind, and when they turned round---wow, syphilis! (23)."
""Great God! what have I turned into? What right have you people to clutter up my life, steal my time, probe my soul, suckle my thoughts, have me for your companion, confidant, and information bureau?" (65)"
""I am a free man---and I need my freedom. I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself, with only the music of my heart for company" (66)"
"In that monent I lost completely the illusion of time and space: the world unfurled its drama simultaneously along a meridian which had no axis. In this sort of hair-trigger eternity I felt that everything was justified, supremely justified; I felt the wars inside me that had left behind this pulp and wrack; I felt the crimes that were seething here to emerge tomorrow in blatant screamers; I felt the misery that was grinding itself out with pestle and mortar, the long dull misery that dribbles away in dirty handkerchiefs. On the meridian of time there is no injustice: there is only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and drama (96)"
"For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will reduece himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideoousness of reality. Everything is endured---disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui---in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable (96)"
"It seemed to me that the great calamity had already manifested itself, that I could be no more truly alone thatn at this very moment (98)"
"At this very moment, in the quiet dawn of a new day, was not the earth giddy with crime and distress? (98)"
"I have found God, but he is insufficent. I an only spiritually dead. Physically I am alive. Morally I am free. That world which I have departed is a menagerie. The dawn is breaking on a new world, a jungle world in which the lean spirits roam with sharp claws. If I am a hyena I am lean and hungry one: I go forth to fatten myself (99)"
""She wanted to moven in here. Imagine that! Asking me if I loved her. I didn't even know her name. I never know their names...I don't want to" (102)"
""I'm actually beginning to hate cunt!" (102)"
""All I ask of life," he says, "is a bunch of books, a bunch of dreams, and a bunch of cunt." (103)"
""The trouble is, you see, I can't fall in love. I'm too much of egoist. Women only help me to dream, that's all. It's a vice, like drink or opium. I've got to have a new one every day; if I don't I get morbid. I think too much. Sometimes I'm amazed at myself, how quick I pull it off---and how little it really means." (103)"
""There's something depraved about screwing a woman who doesn't give a fuck about it." (105)"
""Sometimes I lie in bed dreaming about the past and it's so vivid to me that I have to shake myself in order to realize where I am." (129)"
""A good lay isn't enough for me apparently...they want your soul too..." (129)"
""I get so goddamned mad at myself that I could kill myself...and in a way, that's what I do every time I have an orgasm. For one second I like to obliterate myself." (130)"
""The less you notice them the more they chase after you. There's something perverse about women...they're all masochists at heart." (130)"
"As long as that spark of passion is missing there is no human significance in the performance (144)"
"if you don't get to bed before the birds begin to screech it's useless to go to bed at all (161)"
"As soon as the baby is born and handd over to the authorities she will go back to her trade, she says. She makes hats (162)"
"...there is the trembling glitter of a world which demands only the presense of the female to crystallize the most fugitive aspirations (166)"
"When I realize that she is gone, perhaps gone forever, a great void opens up and I feel that I am falling, falling, falling into the deep, black space. And this is worse than tears, deper than regret or pain or sorrow; it is the abyss in which Satan was plunged. There is no climbing back, no ray of light, no sound of human voice or human touch of hand (178)"
"My world of human beings had perished; I was utterly alone in the world and for friends I had the streets, and the streets spoke to me in that sad, bitter lanuage compounded of human misery, yearning, regret, failure, wasted effort (184)"
"...a mask that is twisted by a vacant smile (184)"
""Defendez-vous contre le syphilis!" (185)"
"It has eaten into our souls and we are nothing but a dead think like the moon (185)"
"It's best ot keep America just like that, always in the background, a sort of picture post card which you look at in a wak moment. LIke that, you imagine it's always there waiting for you, unchanged, unspoiled, a big patriotic open space with cowas and sheep and tenderhearted men ready to bugger everything in sight, man, woman or best. It doesn't exist, America. It's a name you given to an abstract idea... (208)"
"Paris is like a whore. From a distance she seems ravishing, youc an't wait until you have her in your arms. And five minutes later you feel empty, disgusted with yourself. You feel tricked (209)"
""So you see why once in a while I must let myself be sucked by a Lesbian..." (238)"
"Just as the people protect themselves against the invasion of their privacy, by their high walls, their bolts and shutters, their growling, evil-tongued, slatternly concierges, so they have learned to protect themselves against the cold and heat of a bracing, vigorous climate. They have fortified themselves: protection is the keyword. Protection and security. In order that they may rot in comfort (240)"
"At the bottom of every frozen heart there is a drop or two of love---just enough to feed the birds (242)"
"Are these men and women, I ask myself, or are these shadows, shadows of puppets dangled by invisible strings? They move in freedom apparently, but they have nowhere to go. In one realm only are they free and there they may roam at will---but they have not yet learned how to take wing. So far there have been no dreams that have taken wing. Not one man has been born light enough, gay enough, to leave the earth! The eagles who flapped their mighty pinions for a while came crashing heavily to earth. They made us dizzy with the flap and whir of their wings. Stay on earth, you eagles of the future! The heavens have been explored and they are empty. And what lies under the earth is empty too, filled with bones and shadows. Stay on the earth and swim another few hundred thousand years! (245-6)"
"If there were a man who dared to say all that he thought of this world there would not be left him a square foot of ground to stand on. When a man appears the world bears down on him and breaks his back. There are always too many rotten pilars left standing, too much festering humanity for man to bloom. The superstructure is a lie and the foundation is a huge quaking fear. If at intervals of centuries there does appear a man with a desperate, hungry lok in his eye, a man who would turn the world upside down in order to create a new race, the love that he brings to the world is turned to bile and he becomes a scourge (248)"
"If any man ever dared to translate all that is in his heart, to put down what is really his experience, what is truly his truth, I think then the world would go to smash, that it would be blown to smithereens and no god, no accident, no will could ever assemble the pieces, the atoms, the indestructible elements that have gone to make up the world (249)"
"Love and hate, despair, pity, rage, disgust---what are these amidst the fornications of the planets? What is war, disease, cruelty, terror, when ight presents the ecstasy of myriad blazing suns? What is this chaff we chew in our sleep if it is not the remembrance of fang-whorl and star cluster (250)"
"If I am inhuman it is because my world has slopped over its human bounds, because to be human seems like a poor, sorry, miserable affair, limited by the senses, restricted by moralities and codes, defined by platitudes and isms. I am pouring the juice of the grape down my gullet and I find my wisdom in it, but my wisdom is not born of the grape, my intoxication owes nothing to wine... (256)"
"I believe that today more than ever book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it: we must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and soul (257)"
"...the world seems to be falling to pieces. It's a smile thrown across an abyss. The whole stinking civilized world lies like a quagmire at the bottom of the pit, and over it, like a mirage, hovers this wavering smile (283-4)"
Notable Words
officiates
liquescent
crepuscular melange
Anjou
verdigris
gorgonzola
ilex
acromegaly
gesticulating
unctuously
abstemiously
acquiescent
supine
peregrination
emaciated
inveigled
priapic
batik
palatable
excelsior
fecundated
incongruous
fecundity
myriad
ubiquitous
succored
attenuated
odalisque
espied
lugubrious
propensity
chthonian
orthography
desultory
amelioration
cajole
begrudge
somnolence
fuliginous
diapasons
seraglios
madrepore fructifying
centrifugal
metallurgical
periphery
odaliques
malachie
jasper
gangrened
palaver
imputed
tenuous
atavistic
omnipresent
patchouli
epithets
jocosely
echolalia
esoteric
ichor
rectitude
ablation
insipid
bilious-green
indefatigable
magnanimous
divagations
alacrity
execrable
indolent
burgeois
gaiety
defalcations
pemmican
chthonian
vermouth cassis
vacuity
blotte
acuity
alarum
diapason
flatulence
calumniators
imbued
crepuscular
epicene caterwauling
sojourn
somnolent
metallurgical
pederasts
quincuncial
dissensions
inveigled
diatribe
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| Plexus quotes |
[28 Nov 2008|10:53pm] |
I go through Miller's books and highlight things and I thought I'd share with you all everything I highlighted:
"From childhood on that had been my dream, to sit still and make music. It was just dawning on me that to make music one had to first make himself into an exquisite, sensitive instrument. One had to stop leaving and breathe. One had to take off the roller skates. Oh had to unhitch all connections with the world outside. One had to speak privately, with God as his witness." (42)
"Recalling the feel of my foot slipping into the toe-clip, I re-experienced the most delicious sensations. Riding now along the gravel path under the archway of trees that runs Prospect Park to Coney Island, my rhythm one with the machine, my brain thoroughly emptied, only the sensation of rushing through space, fast or slow, according to the dictates of the chronometer inside me. The landscape to either side falling away like the leaves of a calendar. No thoughts, no sensations even. Just everlasting movement forward into space, one with the machine...." (47)
"If to take a walk, "to explore," as I put it---it was for the deliberate purpose of the transforming myself into an enormous eye. Seeing the common, everyday thing in this new light I was often transfixed. The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnified world in itself." (53)
"I accepted and cherished out of the past only what I could convert to creative ends...." (83)
"But a madman in the proper sense of the word. All flame and spirit, he overflows with creative energy. He is the cup which runneth over. And he is alone." (84)
"We deplore the spirit of violence which is prevalet, but to burst the bonds of death the spirit of man must be driven. The most dazzling possibilities enfold us. WE are infused and invested with powers and energies heretofore undreamed of. We are about to live again as human beings, in the full majesty which the world human implies. The heroic work of our forerunners seems now like the work of sacrificial victims. It is not necessary for us to repeat their sacrifices. It is for us to enjoy the fruits. The past lies in ruins, the future yawns invitingly. Take this everyday world and embrace it! Cease laboring altogether and create! For creation is play, and play is divine." (87)
"We weep crocodile tears over his lementable end, forgetting the burst of splendor which preceeded it. Do we weep when the sun sinks into the ocean? The full magnificence of the sun is revealed to us only in the few moments preceding and following its disappearance. If will appear again at dawn, another magnificence, another sun perhaps. All during the day it nourishes and sustains us, but we scarcely give heed to it. We know it is there, we count on it, but we ofer not thanks, no devotion." (87)
"With our instruments we now detect worlds of whose existense ancient man had not the slightest inkling. We are able to plot realms of worlds beyond our present ken, because our minds are already recepetive to the light which emanates from them. At the same time we are also able to visualize our own wholesale distruction. But are we frozen in our tracks? No. Our faith is greater than we dare to admit. WE sense the magnificence of that life eternal which is man's and which we have ever denied. Despite al our pride and vanity, we behave as if we were nothihg of our true heritage. We protest that we are only human, all too human. But if we were truly human we would be capable of all things, ready for all exigencies, know all conditions of being. We ought to reminds ourselves daily, repeat it like a litany, that in our being lies concealed the whole gamut of existence. We should cease worshiping and inspire worship. Above all, we should cease postponing the acting of becoming what in fact and essence we are." (88-89)
""Then what's the crying for---the moon?"" (138)
"The days passed as in a dream, and the nights were the continuation of some other dream." (166)
"...but she didn't see much difference between imaginary bites and real ones, especially if they left marks on one's skin." (166)
"It was the first time I had met any American for whom the word artist suggested magic." (187)
"These powwows, when the three of us got together, were always rambling, hectic, diffuse. Mona, who was never able to concentrate on anythihg for long, had a way of listening which would drive any many crazy. Always, just when you had reached the most interesting part of your story, she was suddenly reminded of something, and it had to be communicated at once. It made no difference wheether we were talking of Cimabue, Sigmund Freud or the Fratellini brothers: the things she thought so important to tell us were as remote as the asteroids." (199)
""You're not cruel, you're honest."" (204)
"It was the same paradise which millions of souls have fabricated in the darkness of despair." (206)
""I'm going to become a magician!"" (212)
"She danced as little as possible. The important thing was to make the victims drink as much as possible." (224)
"I had learned by this time how almost microscopic is that world of mortals of whom one can say: "He's a man you can count on."" (230)
""We are now inexorably united in brotherhood. The end is the same as the beginning. Observe strict etiquette."" (262)
"Fratres Semper!" (264)
"Had he not said once, George Marshall, that the sun rose and set in her ass?" (270)
"...stimulating the convulsive movements of the orgasm." (272)
""Heroism and obscenity appear no more important in the life of the universe that the fighting or mating of a pair of insects in the woods. Everything is on the same plan." (274)
""Man will change nothing of his final destiny, which is to return sooner or later to the unconscious and the formless."" (275)
"I knew it was the end." (278)
""How can a man learn humility when his back is already broken?"" (283)
"The war was over for him---he was one of its relics." (308)
"The fringe of the societal world." (316)
"There are balmy days in childhood when, perhaps because of the great retardation of the time, one steps outdoors into a world which is dozing. It is not the world of humans, nor is it the world of nature which is drowsing---it is the inanimate world of stones, minerals, objects. The inanimate world in bud.... With the slow-motion eyes of childhood one watches breathlessly as this latent realm of life slowly reveals its pulse beat. One becomes aware of the existence of those invisible rays which emanate perpetually from the most remote parts of the cosmos and which radiate from the microcosm as well as from the marcrocosm. "As above, so below." In the twinkle of an eye one is divorced from the illusory world of material reality; which every step one places himself anew at the carrefour of these concentric radiations which are the true substance of an all-encompassing and all-pervading reality. Death has no meaning. All is change, vibration, creation, and re-creation. The song of the world, registered in every particle of that specious substance called matter, issues forth in an inequable harmony which filters through the angelic being lying dormant in the shell of the physical creature called man. Once the angle assumes dominion, the phyiscal being flowers. Throughout all realms a quiet, persistence blossoming takes place." (317)
"Why is it that angles, whom we foolishly associate with the vast interstellar spaces, love everything which is mignon?" (317)
"The microscopic eye of the angle sees the infinite parts which compose devine whole; the telescopic eye of the angle sees nothing but totality, which is perfect. In the wake of the angel there are only universes to behold---size means nothing." (317)
"To eat is wonderful, but to be eaten is a treat beyond description." (320)
"No matter what she was doing she radiated warmth; her ringing laugh dissolved all problems, assured one of her confidence, trust, benevolence. She was postive through and through, yet never arrogant or aggressive." (352)
"Only the superior being can arouse in us the hunger which is justifiable, the hunger to surpass ourselves by becoming what we truly are. In the presence of the superior being we recognize our own majestic powers; we do not long to e that person, we merely thirst to demonstrate to ourselves that we are indeed of that same pith and substance. We rusth foward to greet our brothers and sisters, knowing beyond all doubt that we are al kin...." (355)
"Suspended three stories above the earth, I had the illusion of floating in space. The lawns and shrubs on which my gaze was riveted would vanish. I saw only what I was dreaming of, a perpetual shifting panorama of evanscent as mist. Sometimes queer figures, garbed in the costumes of the period, floated before my eyes---incredible personages such as Samuel Johnson, Dean Swift, Thomas Carlyle, Izaak Walton. Sometimes it was as if the smoke of battle suddenly folled away and min in armor, chargers sumptuously caparisoned, stood lost and bewildered amidst the slain of the battlefield. Birds and animals also played their part in these still visions, particularly the mthological monsters, with all of whom I seemed to be on familiar terms. There was nothing too outlandish, nothing too unexpected about these apparitions to rout me out of my nothingness. I wandered with motionless feet through the vast halls of memory, a sort of living cinemtograph. Now and then I relived an experience which I had had as a child: a moment, for instance, when one sees or hears something for the first time. In such instances I was both the child experiencing this wonder and the nameless individual ovbserving the child. Sometimes I enjoyed that rare experience of synchroniziing my throught and being with the tenuous fragment of a dream long, long forgotten, and, rather than puruse it, rather than fix it objectively in image and sensation, I would toy with the fringes of it, bathe in its aura, so to say, grateful merely that I had caught up with it, that I had scented its immortal presence.
To this period belongs a night dream which I recorded with scrupulous accuracy. I feel it's worth transcribing....
"It opened with a nightmarish vertigo which sent me hurtling from a dizzy precipice into the warm water of the Caribbean. Down, down I swirled, in the great spiral curves which had no begining and promised to end in eternity. During this ceaseless descent a bewildering and enchanting paanorama of marine life unroooled before my eyes. Enormous sea dragons wriggled and shimmered in the powdered sunlight, which filtered through the green waters; huge cactus plants with hideous roots floated by, followed by spongelike coral growths of curious hues, some sullen as oxblood, some with brillian vermilion or soft lavender. Out of this teeming aquatic life poured myriads of animalcules, resembling gnomes and pixies; they bubbled up like gorgeous flux of stardust in the tail-sweep of a comet......................."" (368-372)
""Shucks," I said, "it's only another way of weeping." (377)
"An not only mature but bursting with sex. Everyone knew that they were just a pair of sults. Tina, who was really audacious, was like onf of Degas' women; Henrietta was bigger, juicier, already a wench. They were always whispering smutty stories under their breath, to the amusement of the class. Now and then they drew their dresss up above their knees---to give us a look. Or sometimes Tina woulod grab Henrietta by the eat and squeeze it playflly---all this in class, behind the teacher's back of course." (379)
"In there I dream away whole passages of destiny and causality." (404)
""You see stars where other see only warts or blackheads."" (404)
"When man ate of the Tree of Knowldge he elected to find a short cut to goodhood, He attempted to rob the Creator of the divine secret, which to him spelled power. What has been the result? Sin, disease, death. Eternal warfare, eternal nrest. The little we know we use for our own destruction. We known ont how to scape that tyranny of the convenient monsters we have created. We delude ourselves into believing that, by means of them, we shall one day enjoy leisure and bliss, but all we accomplish, to be truthful, is to create more work for ourselves, more distress, more enmity, more sickness, more death. By our ingenious inventions and discoveries we are gradually altering the face of the earth---until ti becomes unrecognizable in its ugliness." (413)
"With all the stars in the heavens lavishing their radiant powers on us, with the aid of the sun, the moon and all the planets, how is it that we continue to remain in darkness and frustration?" (413)
"We wither and fade away, we perish, beause the desire to live is extinguished. And why does this most potent flame die out? For lack of faith. From the time we are born we are told that we are mortal. From the time we are able to understand words we are taught that we must kill in order to survive. In season and out we are reminded that, no matter how intelligently, reasonably or wisely we life, we shall become sick and die. We are inoculated with the idea of death almost from birth. Is it any wonder that we die?" (413)
"Has the entire world ever stopped to listen in unison to words of wisdom?" (417)
"If such being exist, and I have every reason to believe they do, then the only possible barrier is consciousness. Degrees of consciousness, to be more exact. When we reach to deeper levels of thought and being they will be there, so to speak. We are still unready, unwilling, to mingle with the gods. The men of olden times knew the gods: they saw them face to face. Man was not removed in consciousness, from either the higher or lower orders of creation." (417-8)
"I never realized that women could be so utterly logical. It wouldn't matter what you were discussin---odors, vegetation, diseases or sunspots. Hers is always the last word, no matter what the subject." (420)
"She can with her eyes closed, believe it or not." (420)
"...back to the stret of early sorrows." (504)
"(In the sout the heat explains almost anything, except lynching.)" (537)
"Sie ist wie eine Blume." (539)
"I am telling you that it is your own fear and ignorance which keep you in slavery. There is only one kind of education, that which leads you to assert and mainatin your own freedom." (563)
""Age means nothing," he interrupated. "It isn't age which makes us wise. Nor even experience, as people pretend. It's the quickness of the spirit. The quick and the dead.... You, of all people, should know what I mean. There are only two classes in this world---and in every world---the quick and the dead. For those who cultivate the spirit nothing is impossible. For the others, everything is impossible, or incredible, or futile. When you live day after day with the impossible you begin to wonder what the world means. Or ather, how it ever came to mean what it does. There's a world of light, in whcih everything is clear and manifest, and ther's a world of confusion, where all is murky and obscure. The two worlds are really one. Those in the world of darkness give a glimpse now and then of the realm of light, but those in the world of light know nothing of darkness. The men of light cast no shadow. Evil is unknown to them. NOr do they harbor resentment. They move without chains or fetters. Until I returned to thise country I associated only with such men, Ih some ways my life is stranger than you think. Why did I go among the Navajos? 'To find peace and understanding. If I had been born in another time I might have been a Christ or Buddha. Here I'm a bit of a freak. Even you have difficulty not to think that way about me."" (571)
"The secret, however, lies in not caring whether anyone, not even the Almighty, has confidence in you. You must come to realize, and you will undoubtedly, that you need no protection. Nor should you hunger afer salvation, for salvation is only a myth. What is there to be saved? Ask yourselve that! And if saved, saved from what? Have you thought of these things? Do! There is no need for redemption vecause what men call sin and guilt have no ultimate meaning. The quick and the dead!---just remember that! When you reach to the quick of things you will find neither acceleration nor retardation, neither brith nor dearth. There is and you are---that's it in a nutshell. Don't break your skull over it, because to the mind it makes no sense. Accept it and forget it---or it will drive you mad..." (573)
"Who made the stars, the sun, the raindrops?" (578)
"It isn't necessary for me to tune in: I've been in tune since the dawn of time. Utter clarity is what marks my performance. I am of the order whose purpose is not to teach the world a lesson but to explain that school is over." (610)
"Suddenly we are asked to look into the depths of the tomb with the same zeal and jow with which we first greeted life." (622)
"Alles Vergangliche ist nur ein Gliechnis." (622)
"What really signifies is not that an individual or a people is 'in condition,' well-nourished and fruitful, but for what he or it is so.... It is only with the coming of Civilization, when the whole form-world begins to ebb, that mere life-preserving beings to outline itself, nakedly and insistently---thisis the time when the banal assertion that 'hunger and love' are the driving forces of live ceases to be ashamed of itself; when life comes ot mean, not a waxing in strength for that task, but a matter of 'happiness of the greatest number,' of comfort and ease, of 'panem et circenses'; and when, in the plae of grand politics, we have economic politics as an end of itself..." (627-8)
"If the solution to life is the living of it, then let us live, live more abundantly!" (631)
"I look at those around me I see only the profiles averted faces. They are trying not to look at life---it is too terrible or too horrible, to this or too that. They see only the awesome dragon of life, and they are impotent before the monster. If only they had the courage to look straight into the dragon's jaws!" (632)
"Open eyes wide and the stir must die down. And when the stir dies down then commences the music." (633)
"Gazing at a star outside my window, I could magnify it ten thousand times; I could roam from star to star, like an angle, endeavoring all the while to graps the universe in these supertelescopic proprtions. I would then return to my chair, look at my fingernail, or rather at an almost invisible spot on the nail, and see into the universe which the physicist endeavors to create out of the atomic web of nothingness. That man could ever conceive of "nothingness" always astounded me." (634)
"On lonely nights, pondering the problem---only one ever!---I could see so very cleary the world as it is, see what it is and why it is the way it is. I could reconcile grace with evile, divine order with rampant ugliness, imperishable creation with utter sterility. I could make myself so finely attuned that a mere zephyr wold blow me to dust. Instant annihilation or enduring life---it was one and the same to me. I was at balance, both sides so evenly poised that a molecule of air would tip the scales." (635)
""My life was one long rosy crusifixion."" (640)
"Perhaps in opening the wound, my own wound, I closed other wounds, other people's wounds. Something dies, something blossoms. To suffer in ignorance is horrible. To suffer deliberately, in order to understand the nature of suffering and abolish it forever, is quite another matter." (640)
"Suffering is unnecessary. But one has to suffer before he is able to realize that this is so. It is only then, moreover, that the true significance of human suffering becomes clear. At the last desperate moment---when one can suffer no more!---something happens which is in the nature of a miracle. The great open wound which was draining the blood of life closes up, the organism blossoms like a rose. One is "free" at least, and not "with a yearning for Russia," but with a yearning for ever more freedom, ever more bliss. The tree of life is kept alive not by tears but by knowledge that freedom is real and everlasting." (640)
Great Words:
assuagement
bequeath
despondent
quixotic
impetuous
gesticulating
acumen
goiterous
jocosely
impudent
peremptory
atrophied
discomfiture
anomalous
incongruous
somnolent
eclosion
dilapidation
circumspectly
iniquity
enmity
fabulist
precocious
litany
oracular
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| Photo |
[28 Nov 2008|07:17pm] |
My greetings to you all!
I have a request: I need a hi-quality picture of Miller - does anybody have one? My girlfrienf is fond of him and I'd like to make her a small present...
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[13 Mar 2008|01:47pm] |
Having seen the excellent movie Henry & June, one scene has always puzzled me. After Henry finished his draft of Tropic of Cancer, he signs it as "Anonymous."
In Issue 5 of Nexus, there's a brief snippet in the article titled "Sex Dreams, Cancer & Nightmares -- Joseph Millard Osman, Anonymous Friends, The Tribune Crowd, & Henry Miller's Unknown Book" by the wonderful Karl Orend. Here is an excerpt that finally solves my mystery:
"Among Joesph Millard Osman's neighbors (at 16 rue Denfert Rochereau) were the poet Walter Lowenfels and his wife Lillian, who had briefly met Henry and June at a party at Ossip Zadkine's atelier, back in 1928. They had not seen each other since. In the meantime, Lowenfels had received important recognition for his writing. He had followed up his early book Episodes and Epistles (1925) with The Richard Aldington Award for American Poets, shared with e. e. cummings (1930), Elegy for Apollinaire (published by Nancy Cunard's The Hours Press, 1930), and a manifesto called Anonymous, which called for an anonymous movement in the arts--books to be published without the author's name appended, so that the work would stand alone--not be judged by existing reputation, or allegiance to literary coteries. Lowenfels would become a friend, and sometimes collaborator, of Miller, especially during the period 1931-34. He is the model for Jabberwhorl Cronstadt in Black Spring. Tropic of Cancer was first scheduled to appear anonymously, in line with Lowenfels' manifesto."
Of course, something can be said for Miller's fears of being censored and jailed--but still, I'm always incredibly amazed at how much research was put into the movie,as there are references to Henry and June's life in New York that don't appear simply in Nin's diaries/novel of the same name.
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[22 Jan 2008|10:08pm] |
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Hi, I am another fan of Henry Miller. Really glad to have found this lovely place! My first book of the Master was "Sexus". But it was many years ago, I have a sudden appetite to reread it, and to read other things, too. By the way, I wonder if anyone knows about some HM works online. Thanks.
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| new! |
[16 Jan 2008|04:56pm] |
i just discovered this community and then decided that i had to join!
i just got 2 of henry miller's books (colossus and tropic of capricorn) and i cant wait to read them! this summer i read "stand still like the hummingbird." it is so amazingg.
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| Under the Roofs of Paris ~ a tribute to Henry Miller |
[11 Dec 2007|03:13pm] |
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ever after, rasmus faber |
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I wanted to share my latest tryst, a recent acquisition of a print I bought called "Under the Roofs of Paris ~ a tribute to Henry Miller" !
Under the Roofs of Paris ~ a tribute to Henry Miller
artist/ luke charchuk
It reminds me of the book I have, called "Crazy Cock" by H.M., ribald and full of sarciastic satyrs, written in 1927, it is one of his few novels to feature a character other than Henry Miller in the role of protagonist. Tony Bring is depicted as a struggling writer with a bourgeois background who gets enmeshed in human flesh of an unusual love triangle when his wife's female lover Vanya comes to live in their cramped Greenwich Village apartment, things get too close for comfort, but not too close for pleasure...
The other book I like was an immovable feast by Ernest Hemingway, memoirs about his years in Paris as part of the American expatriate circle of writers in the 1920's. Apparently the Feast was quite Movable...
"I love hearing it straight from the author's gift horse in the mouth, and Paris has always fascinated by me with his Eiffel tower, even though he kidnapped Helen. Maybe he should have used a Trojan horse? -- Neigh! I say!" ~ psp
crazy cock,
pigshitpoet
"Henry Miller says, 'Paint what you like and die happy' " ~ Anthony Hopkins
Miller Primitiva
Henry Miller, Arthur Recital , 1943 Watercolor on paper ,10" x 1 4"
Right-click link to open page in new window:
The Writer's Brush ~ How Writers Paint the World, Anita Shopolsky Gallery
http://www.anitashapolskygallery.com/past_exhibits_writers.html
These are interesting works of art to me by other writers. . .
 . 
E.E. Cummings, Performer . . . . . . . . . . . Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Freud
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| A great quote by my patron saint |
[25 Oct 2007|05:44pm] |
”I see this other race of individuals ransacking the universe, turning everything upside down, their feet always moving in blood and tears, their hands always empty, always clutching and grasping for the beyond, for the god out of reach: slaying everything within reach in order to quiet the monster that gnaws at their vitals. I see that when they tear their hair with the effort to comprehend, to seize this forever unattainable, I see that when they bellow like crazed beasts and rip and gore, I see that this is right, that there is no other path to pursue. A man who belongs to this race must stand up on the high place with gibberish in his mouth and rip out his entrails. It is right and just, because he must! And anything that falls short of this frightening spectacle, anything less shuddering, less terrifying, less mad, less intoxicated, less contaminating, is not art. The rest is counterfeit. The rest is human. The rest belongs to life and lifelessness.”
Henry Miller
I am new here. But I would really like to connect with other Henry Miller devotees. I really hope that this community will survive. Anyway, hit me up and let’s talk.
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| new here; |
[26 Oct 2007|02:40am] |
I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it: we must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and soul. It may be that we are doomed, that there is no hope for us, any of us, but if that is so then let us set up a last agonizing, bloodcurdling howl, a screech of defiance, a war whoop! Away with lamentation! Away with elegies and dirges! Away with biographies and histories, and libraries and museums! Let the dead eat the dead. Let us living ones dance about the rim of the crater, a last expiring dance. But a dance!
Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, 1934
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| Big Sur |
[03 Sep 2007|06:47pm] |
I always enjoyed this great novel, The Big Sur and the Oranges..... Henry's best works from the early days left a mark as a writer but the Big Sur gave me the balls to publish my novel. Thanks Henry.
Guy
www.hardboiledmen.com
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| Miller essay |
[28 Jul 2007|05:03pm] |
I'm hoping people can read and comment on this essay I've written comparing the characters in "Colossus" and "Big Sur."
www.mitchellmaher.org/garen/miller_gande.doc
Any criticism is welcome. If you feel more comfortable you can e-mail me at gjtorikian at gmail.com.
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| why "Tropic of..." |
[05 Jun 2007|11:10am] |
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I'm hoping someone can tell me *why* Henry Miller gave his books the titles of "Tropic of Cancer" and "Tropic of Capricorn"
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[05 May 2007|05:41pm] |
How has this community fallen in interaction? I refuse to allow this to happen. At least once a week I am going to try to post a new item to bolster support of the man that is Henry Miller.
We'll start slow: http://www.cosmotc.blogspot.com/ is a Henry Miller resource blog with more content than you probably ever thought existed.
The difficulty in receiving Miller is that he is both slandered for his "sexual politics" (which are non-existent) and obscured by the fact that his writings were banned and obscured by out-of-print small literary magazines. There's not a lot of material out there on him, but the small community is a fierce one.
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| Henry & June |
[25 Mar 2007|11:37am] |
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Did anyone like Fred Ward's portrayal of Miller in the film??
I found it a bit excrutiating, to tell the truth.
Opinions welcome. :)
"No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore to us the belief in our own guidance."
-Henry Miller
.....how timeless he is.....
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| This came as news to me |
[20 Oct 2006|01:00am] |
In April (1934), when Nin was in London trying to hunt up a publisher for Tropic of Cancer, Miller wrote her that he had been revising the manuscript again and now liked it better. It gave the impression, he wrote, of having been written at twenty-five different addresses—which it had been. When Nin returned with no offers, Miller began to despair. Kahane was claiming to be nearly bankrupt, and Miller had broken with Bradley, denouncing him as an old man who got sadistic pleasure out of critiquing younger men. Then, in June, Kahane agreed to publish the book if Nin would pay printing costs; she agreed to advance him 5,000 francs (about $300).
By July, Miller and Nin were reading proofs. The book needed a preface Kahane thought, because the material was so inflammatory. He offered to provide one, but Miller declined. Instead, he wrote the essay himself and had Nin sign it (she no doubt had something to do with its composition as well). It was a rare opportunity; he could "explain" the book, and point out its importance—under someone else's name. Kahane accepted it, and publication was scheduled for September.
--Mary V. Dearborn
*The Happiest Man Alive: a biography of Henry Miller*
( Tropic of Cancer's Preface )
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| Letters by Henry Miller to Hoki Tokuda Miller |
[27 Sep 2006|01:16am] |
In 1966, Henry Miller was calling The Pacific Palisades home. On Wednesday nights, he'd go into Beverly Hills to visit his doctor and friend, Lee Siegel. He never brought along any "intellectuals," as he was "sick of hearing people discuss art and literature in [his] home;" it was a chance for him to have some fun.
On one of these nights, in Beverly Hills, Miller met a new love. Her name was Hoki Tokuda, and she was in the United States working at the—now extinct--Imperial Gardens. She was, by all accounts, an accomplished jazz singer and pianist. She was on a work visa. She'd also been in two films, by then. Japanese films, they were titled Nippon Paradise(1964) and Chinkoro Amakko (1965). (Those are IMDb links you're looking at, incidentally, and neither offers much to look at.)
She was twenty-seven years old.
Dated February 22nd, this is the first note from Miller to his newfound love in the collection of their correspondence, edited by Joyce Howard:
Dear Hoki
I hope to see you one evening this week at the Imperial Gardens. Maybe I will bring my friend Joe Gray along. He wants to meet nice Japanese girl.
Henry Miller
(This needs to be viewed at full-screen. Please let me know if there are any problems viewing this. Thanks, in advance!)
( And there began a most unusual correspondence. )
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| Ponder. |
[02 Jul 2006|08:02pm] |
New to the community, but certainly not new to Miller. I've been studying him for the last 10 years and am working on a Master's thesis exclusively exploring the Parisian underbelly of the Modern-Post Modern void.
Many people who encounter Miller read him for pleasure; he is not often introduced to students in the liberal arts and sciences because of controversy and mere exclusion from literary canons.
I, often, have more background in his life, work, and circle of friends than my literature professors. Miller is scoffed at, pushed aside, and not accepted purely because of his juvenile rambling, hyper-sexuality and expatriation. Even in specialized studies, Miller is slighted against the larger figures of Modernism or Beat writers. Last Spring I presented an essay featuring Miller and Bukowski, and the Beat Literature scholars were near appalled that I mention Miller as such a strong influence on that era.
As a reader of Miller, you have incredible potential to see into the power of art, as well as the oppression of the larger organizations that control it.
What do you think of his absence in educational institutions/studies? What have you encountered? Why such opposition?
My professors have either no knowledge, think he was married to Marilyn Monroe, or are ashamed to give him credit. The only educator who ever credited him was my 9th grade art teacher who noted him as being "intense and deep."
What gives?
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| Sexus Quotes |
[20 Jun 2006|12:39am] |
Sexus by Henry Miller
Sexus by Henry Miller
Drop dead and the man behind you walks over you; fire a revolver and another man fires at you; yell and you wake the dead, who, oddly enough, also have powerful lungs (7).
Like a celestial tailor, he tries on one body after another, but they are all misfits. Finally he is obliged to return to his own body, to reassume the leaden mold, to become a prisoner of the flesh, to carry on in torpor, pain, and ennui (9).
It seemed more than ever senseless to be passing my life away in the attempt to fill up a permanent leak (15).
...parenthetical limbo peppered with fireworks... (17)
He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment (18).
"fictive"
The first quivering word he puts to paper is the word of the wounded angel: pain (18).
Words, sentences, ideas, no mater how subtle or ingenious, the maddest flights of poetry, the most profound dreams, the most hallucinating visions, are but crude hieroglyphs chiseled in pain and sorrow to commerorate an event which is untransmissible (20).
The part of dreaming when wide awake will be in the power of every man one day (20).
"Tillie Jupiter"
Sometimes the rebound has resembled a slow-motion performance, but in the eys of God speed has no particular significance (25).
Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he is quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering pofound truths. We all derive from the same source. There is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we hare only to open up, only to discover whati s already there (26).
It fired out hearts, illuminated our thoughts, magnitized our souls. Its warmth would last far into the night, would flow back from below the curved horizon in defiance of the night (27).
He believes in you only in so far as he knows you; the possibility that you are great than you seem is disturbing, for friendship is founded on mutuality (28).
You know that you'll never be able to recapture these ideas, not a single line of all the tumultuous and marvelously dovetailed sentences which sift through your mind like sawdust spilling through a hole (29).
Tears are easier to put up with than joy. Joy is destructive: it makes others uncomfortable (31).
To be joyous is to be a madman in a world of sad ghosts (31).
...say something very simple, very honest, as one human being to another (37).
"To look into your eyes is like looking into a dark mirror" (40).
"You saw in me something you had never observed in another woman. You saw the mask which is your own" (41).
"You will always be trying to dominate yourself; the woman you love will only be an instrument for you to practice on..." (42).
To love or be loved is no crime. The really criminal thing is to be make a person believe that he or she is the only one you could ever love (52).
The fellow who is really practical is the fool who looks neither to the left nor the right, who gives without question and asks unblushingly (62).
He was dying a statistical indigestion (78).
These furious sorties with adders and rose petals made an intoxicating sort of music, a steel-stringed zithery slipper-gibber which could also register anomalous sounds like sobs and falling jets of water (87).
Myself, I noticed everything, evern the new cracks in the plaster walll which I stared at so intensely when alone that, if I were given the time, I could read back at top speed, without missing a comma or a dash, the whole history of the human race leading up to the particular square inch of plaster on which my eyes were focused (88).
There is no reason to stay indoors and silently murder one another (88).
It's lonely up there in the North. Yes sir, we go blue with fright and loneliness. Live in little rooms, eat with knives and forks, carry watches, liver pills, bread crumbs, sausages. Don't know where we're at up there, honest, Mister. We're frightened to death we'll say something, something real (96).
Put me on the fucking block and fuck! (100).
"Fuck for fuck's sake"
'Give me some money, I want to buy a duck!' (121).
I asked myself how long it would take to go crazy if one bought a duck and settled down on Long Island with it (122).
If I were to own a duck I would call it MacGregor, tie it to a lamppost and shoot it with a .48-caliber revolver (124).
I had reached a state of indifference born of dispair (124).
"extemporaneous" (126)
And yet---yet despite all the outward evidence of being close-kint, interrelated, neighborly, good-humored, helpful, sympathethic, almost brotherly, we are a lonely people, a mobrid, crazed herd thrashing about in zealous frenzy, trying to forget that we are not what we think we are, not really united, not really devoted to one another, not really listening, not really anything, just digits shuffled about by some unseen hand in a calculation which doesn't concern us (127).
But we are not equals; we are mostly inferior, vastly inferior, inferior particularly to those who are quiet and contained, who are simple in their ways, and unshakable in their beliefs. We resent what is steady and anchored, what is impervious to our blandishments, our logic, our collectivized cud of principles, our antiquated forms of allegiance (128).
"I guess the trouble with me is that I can't swallow the fact that I'm another nobody." (140)
...her movements were those of a dreamer desperately struggling to re-enter the body which had begun to act of surrender (142).
Two solid bodies colliding in space at the wrong time, rubbing surfaces together, exchanging souvenirs, plugging in wrong numbers, promising and repromising, forgetting, parting, remembering again...hurried, mechanical, meaningless, and what the hell does all add up to? (177)
Beautiful as a Dresdon doll, only she had raven tresses and a Javanese slant to her soul.
I want to be with myself for a while, see how it feels. I hardly known myself, living the way I do. I'm engulfed. I know all about others---and another about myself (189).
For suddenly I remembered the day when for the first time in my life I looked into the mirror and realized that I was gazing at a stranger (203).
If you persist in throtting your impulses you end by becoming a clot of phlegm. You finally spit out a gob which completely drains you and which you only realize years later was not a gob of spit but your inmost self. If you lose that you will always race through dark streets like a madman pursued by phantoms (205).
The truly serious person is gay, almost nonchalant (205).
"I stood before a mirror and said fearfully: 'I want to see how I look in the mirror with my eyes closed.'" (207)
Richter (author)
But in those periods which we call crises, when the mind sunders and plinters like a diamond under the blows of a sledge hammer, these innocent ideas of a dreamer take hold, lodge in the crevices of the brain, and by some subtle process of infiltration bring about a definite, irrevocable alteration of the personality (208).
A creative life! Ascension. Passing beyond oneself. Rocketing out inot the blue, grasping at flying ladders, mounting, soaring, lifting the world up by the scalp, rousing the angles from their ethereal liars, drowing in stellar depths, clinging to the tails of comets (209).
"Stairs and contradictory stairs," he [Nietzsche] wrote, and then suddenly there was no longer any bottom; the mind, like a splintered diamond, was pulverized by a hammer blows of truth (209).
Flashing his sword above the Gordian knot, he promises speedy deliverance. A delusion which ends in an ocean of blood (212).
The power which we long to possess, in order to establish the good, the true and the beautiful, wound prove to be, if we could have it, but the means of destroying one another (213).
Drama always affected me strangely, always aroused the sense of ridiculous, especially when motivated by love. Perhaps that was why, in moments of desperation, I could always laugh at myself. The moment I made the decision to act I became another person---the actor. And of course I always overplayed the part (228).
How we hate the admit that we would like nothing better than to be the slave! Slave and master at the same time! For even in love the slave is always the master in disguise. The man who must conquer the woamn, subjugate her, bend her to his will, form her according to his desires---is he not the slave of his slave? (228)
There are moments when the elixir of life rises to such overbrimming spendor that the soul spills over. In the seraphic smile of the Madonnas the soul is seen to flood the psyche. The moon of the faces becomes full; the equation is perfect. A minute, a half minute, a second later, the miracle has passed. Something intangible, something inexplicable, was given out---and recieved. In the life of a human being it may happen that the moon never comes to the full. In the lives of some human beings it would seem, indeed, that the only mysterious phenomenon observable is that of perpetual eclipse. In the case of those afflicted with genius, whatever the form it may take, we are almost frightened to observe that there is nothing but a continuous waxing and waning of the moon (265).
They melt like ice cream on a sultry day in August. And yet, as they mrge toward the inchoate magma which is the very stuff of our soul, some blurred knot of rememberance keeps alive---forever, it would seem---the dim and velvety outline of a palpable, sentient continuum wherein the move and hand, not their being, but reality. Reality! That which embraces, sustains and exalts life. It is in this stream that one craves to return and remain forever immersed (292).
I am the prisoner of the house of the misplaced love. I am August Angst growing a melancholy beard. I am a drone whose sole function is to shoot spermatozoa into a cuspidor of anguish (296).
"What do you think life is, a wet dream?" (308)
The most difficult ones are what I would call the "Piscean malingerers." Thse are the fluid, solvent egos who lie still as a fetus in the uterine marsches of their stagnant self. When you punctur the sca, when you think Ah! I've got you at last! you find nothing but clots of mucus in your hand. Thsee are the baffling ones, in my opinion. They are like the "soluble fish" of surrealist metempsychology. They grow without a backbone; they dissolve at will. All you can ever lay hold of are the indissoluble, indestructible nuclei---the disease germs, so to say. About such individuals one feels that in body, mind and soul they are nothing but disease. They were born to illustrate the pages of textbooks. In the realm of the psyche they are the gynecological monsters whose only life is that of the pickled specimen which adorns the laboratory shelf.
Their most successful disguise is compassion. How tender they can become! How considerate! How touchingly spymathetic! But if you could ever get a look at athem---just one fluorescent glance!---what a pretty egomanica you would see. They bleed with every bleeiding soul in the universe---but they never fall apart. At the crucifixtion they hold your hand and slake your thirst, weep like drunken cows. They are the professional mourners from time immemorial; they were so even in the Golden Age, when tere was nothing to weep about. Misery and suffering is their habitat, and at the equinox they bring the whole kaleidoscopic pattern of life to a glaucous glue... (334-335)
"It is not necessary to die in order to come at last face to face with reality. Reality is here and now, everywhere, gleaming through every reflection that meets the eye.
At last the ditch it gets dinned into our thick skulls that we are all part and parcel of the same flesh. When our very lives are threatened we begin to life.
That is the picture of human life on this planet called the Earth. Everybody is a neurotic, down to the last man and woman.
To be cured we must rise from our graves and throw off the cerements of the dead.
We must die as egos and be born again in the swarm, not separate and self-hypnotized, but individuals and related.
The Buddha went so far as to say: "Believe nothing, no matter where you read it or who has said it, not even if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense." (337)
You are the author, director and actor all in one: the drama is always going to be your own life, not someone else's (340).
Sing the praises of the Lord, it is enjoined. Aye, sing out! Sing out, O Master-builder! Sing out, glad warrior! But, you quibble, how can I sing when the world is crumbling, when all about me is bathed in blood and tears? Do you realize that the martyrs sang when they were being burned at the stake? They saw nothing crumbling, they heard not shrieks of pain. They sang because they were full of faith. Who can demolish faith? Who can wipe out joy? Men have tried, in every age. But they are not succeeded. Joy and faith are inherent in the universe. In growth there is pain and struggle; in accomplishment there is a joy and exuberance; in fulfillment there is peace and serenity. Between the plans and spheres of existence, terrestrial and superterrestrial, there are ladders and lattices. They one who mounts sings. He is made drunk and exalted by unfolding vistas. He ascends sure-footedly, thinking not of what lies below, should he slip and lose his grasp, but what lies ahead. Everything lies ahead. The way is endless, and the farther one reaches the more the road opens up. The bogs and quagmires, the marches and sinkholes, the pits and snares, are all in the mind. They lurk in waiting, ready to swallow one up the moment one ceases to advance. The phantasmal world is the world which has not been fully conquered over. It is the world of th epast, never of the future. To move forward clinging to the past is like dragging a ball and chain. The prisoner is not the one who has commited a crime, but the one who clings to his crime and lives it over and over. We are all guilty of crime, the great crime of not living life to the full. But we are all potentially free. We can stop thinking of waht we have failed to do and do whatever lies within our power. What these powers that are in us may be no one has truly dared to imagine. That they are infinite we will realize the day we admit to ourselves that imagination is everything. Imagination is the voice of daring. If there si anything God-liek about God it is that. He dared to imagine everything (340-1).
To make herself invulnerable---that was her obsessive concern.
"Let me carry the burden of your sweet defect!" That is the cry of the lovesikt heart.
And if the adorable cripple insists on playing the game of pretense then the heart already open and enfolding yawns with the aching void of the grave (344).
Life water, woman always finds her own leve. And like water also, she mirrors faithfull all that passes in the soul of the man (345).
Supposing that in the twenty-first century we had a truent of Mormonism? Or that we began to see, and not only to see but to practice, the sexual logical of the Eskimos? (390)
"I like any kind of food. I like everything. I like you, I like Mona, I like my wife, I like horses, cows chickens, pinochle, tapioca, Bach, benzine, prickly heat..."
"You like everything, yes...but you don't love."
"I do too. I love food, wine, women. Of course I do. What makes you think I don't? If you like, you love. Love is only the superlative degree. I love like God loves---without distinction of time, place, race, color, sex and so forth. I love you too---that way. It's not enough, I suppose?" (392)
"Thinking doesn't get you anywhere anyhow. It's a delusion. Thinking makes you morbid."
"I suppose it does sound funny," I continued, "to hear someone say, 'I love it, it's wonderful, it's good, it's great' meaning everything. Of course I don't feel that way every day---but I'd like to. And I do when I'm normal, whatn I'm myself. Everybody does, if given a chance. It's the natural state of the heart. The troulble is, we're terrorized most of the time. I say 'we're terrorized,' but I mean we terrorize ourselves." (394)
"I used to occupy myself with those problems when I was younger---when I was fifteen or sixteen. I understood everything then, very clearly...that is, as fr as the mind permits one to understand things. I was more pure, more disinterested, so to speak. I didn't have to defend or uphold anything, least of all a system which I never did believe in, not even as a child. I workd out an ideal universe, all my own.
"Perfect freedom. It was a vacuum---and in it I exploded. What I really wanted, you see, was that everyone should behave as I behaved, or thought would behave. I wanted a world made in my own image, a world that would breathe my spirt. I made myself God, since there was nothing to hinder me...." (395)
"Nothing would be bad or ugly or evil---if we really let ourselves go. But it's hard to maek people understand that. Anyway, that's the difference between the world of imagination and the world of common sense, which isn't common sense at all but sheer buggery and insaity. If you stop till and look at things....I say look, not think, not criticize...the world looks absoluately crazy to you. And it is carzy, by God! It's just as crazy when things are nomral and peaceful as in times of war and revolution. The evils are insane evils, and the panaceas are insane panaceas. Because we're all driven like dogs. We're running away. From what? We don't know. From a million nameless things.
"From the time you wake up until the moment you go to bed it's all a lie, alla sham and a swindle. Everybody knows it, and everybody collaborates in the perpetuation of the hoax.
"At sixteen you can believe in a new world...you can blieve in anything, in fact...but at twenty you're doomed, and you know it. At twenty you're well in harness, adn the msot you can hope for is to get off with arms and legs intact. It isn't a question of fading hope....Hope is a baneful sign; it means impotence. Courage is no use either: everybody can muster courage---for the wrong thing." (396)
"I feel something as though I'm going to burst. I really don't give a dam about the misery of the world. I take it for granted. What I want is to open up. I'm like an imbecile with a can opener in his hand, wondering where to begin---to open up the earth. I know that underneath the mess everything is marvelous. I'm sure of it. I know it because I feel so marvelous myself most of the time." (397)
"We don't see waht is under our nose because wer'e so intent on seeing the stars, or what lies beyond the stars." (398)
"If you can be a worm you can be a good too." (401)
They could make a failure of her only by giving her free rein (403).
"supercilious"
"We know your kind. We are not always eager to have your love. We have been betrayed so often. Sometimes it is better to have a good enemy---then we know where we stand. With your kind we are never sure where we stand. You are like water---and we are rocks. YOu eat us away little by little---not with malice, but with kindness. You lap against us like waves of the saea. The big waves we can meet---but the gentle lapping, that takes our strength away." (426)
"The world passes away, but the spirit is eternal. My little boy understood that. He wanted to remain pure. The world was not good enough for him. He died of shame---shame for the world..." (427)
Then if you become very still, standing on a stoop, for instance, and carefully think no thoughts, a myopic, bestial clarity besets your vision. There is a wheel, there are spokes, and there is a hub. And in the cetner of the hub there is---exactly nothing. It is where the grease goes, and the axle. And you are there, in the center of nothingness, sentient, fully expanded, whirring with the whir of planetary wheels. Everythinb becomes alive and meaningful, even yesterday's snot which clings to the doorknob. Everything sags and droops, is mossed with wear and care; everything has been looked at thousands of tiems, rubbed and caressed by the occipital eye... (429)
One sits int he middle of a river called Nostalgia. A river filled with little sourvenirs gathered from the wreckage of the world. Souvenirs of the homeless, of birds of refuge building again and again with sticks and twigs. Everywhere broken nests, eggshells, fledglings with twisted nekcs and dead eyes staring into space. Nostalgic river dreams under tin copings, under rusty sheds, underst capsized boats. A world of mutilated hopes, of strangled aspirations, of bullet-proof starvation. A world where even the warm breath of life has to be smuggled in, where gems bag as pigeons' hearts are traded for a yard of space, an ounce of freedom. All in compounded into a familiar liver paste which is swallowed on a tasteless wafer. In one gulp there is swallowed down fiver thousand years of bitterness, five thousand years of ashes, five thousand years of broken twigs, smashed eggshells, strangled fledglings...
In the deep subcellar of the human heart the dolorous twang og iron harp rings out.
Build your cities proud and high. Lay your sewers. Span your rivers. Work feverishly. Sleep dreamlessly. Sing madly, like a bulbul. Underneath, below the deepest foundations, there lives another race of men. They are dark, sombetr, passionate. They muscle into the bowels of the earth. They wait with a patience which is terrifying. They are the scavengers, the devourers, the avengers. They emerger when everything topples to dust (430-1).
It was opweratir, mercuiar, tonsorial (450).
"I wondered for a moment if I had underestimated him. Nobody should be spurned or rejected who gives even the illusion of feeling. How could I twell what struggles he had made, and was still making perhaps, to rise to the surface? What right had I to judge him---or anybody? If people smile at you, take your arm, give off a glow, it must be that there is something in them which responds. Notbody is altogether dead.
"One doesn't want appreciation...one wants a response. To tell the truth, I don't know what I want of you, or of anybody, for that matter. I want more than I get, what's all I know. I want to step out of your skin. I awn everbody to strip down, not just to the flesh, but the soul. Sometimes I get so hungry, so rapacious, that I could eat peopel up. I can't wait for them to tell me things...how they feel...what they want...and so on. I want to chew them alive...find out for myself...quick, all at once. Listen..." (459)
"When I finish the pitcher of water I'll begin to believe that everybody is as good as everybody else: I'll lose all sense of values. That's the only we have of knowing how to be happy---to believe that we are identical. It's the delusion of the poor in spirity. It's like Purgatory equipped with electric fans and streamline furniture. It's the caricature of joyousness. Joy means unity; happiness means plurality."
"That's reflected happiness. You're living on the moon. As soon as I stop shining you'll become extinct." (461)
"Let's talk about anything that will prevent us from thinking or feeling.
"I want to hear somebody say something...something original.
"Listen, once I had ordinary brains, ordinary dreams, ordinary desires. I nearly went nuts. I loathe the ordinary....Death is ordinary---it's what happens to everybody. I refuse to die. I've made up my mind that I'm going to live forever. Death is easy: it's like the booby hatch, only you can't masturbate any more." (466)
"I'm a conservative. I think that woman have to act dum in order to make meen feel like fools..."
"Well, sometdy you'll discover that ther's only one problem on your hands---yourself." (467)
We are a community of seven or eight million people, democratically free and equal, dedicated to the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness for all---in theory. We represent nearly all the races and peoples of the world at the height of their cultural attainments---in theory. We have the right to worship as we please, vote as we please, create our own lawas, and so forth and so on---in theory.
Theoretically everything is ideal, just, equitable. Africa is still a dark continent which the white man is only beginning to enlighten with Bible and sword. Yet, by some queer, mystical agreement, a woman called Cleo is performinng and obscene dance in a darkened house next door to a church. If she were to dance this way in the street she would be arrested; if she were to dance this way in a private house she would be raped and mangled; if she were to dance this way in Carnegie Hall she would create a revolution. Her dance is a violation of the Constitution of the United States. It is archaic, primitive, obscene, tending only to arouse and inflame the base passions of men and women. It has only one honest purpose in view---to augment the box office receipts for the for the Minsky Brothers. That it does. And there one must stop thinking about the subject or go crazy (480-1)
I can't believe that we are in limbo, admist the smoke of astral worlds, and that what passes before the ey is a mirage from the phenomenal world of pain and crucifixtion (481).
Sorry for any errors---there was a lot to type.
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