tail when they got a dose of their own medicine? "Listen, I
know a guy who cleaned out a nestful of them in the Argonne region - he said
they were so god-damned low he wouldn't shit on them. He said he wouldn't
even waste a bullet on them - he just bashed their brains in with a dub. I
forget this guy's name now, but anyway he told me he saw aplenty in the few
months he was there. He said the best fun he got out of the whole fucking
business was to pop off his own major. Not that he had any special grievance
against him - he just didn't like his mug. He didn't like the way the guy
gave orders. Most of the officers that were killed got it in the back, he
said. Served them right, too, the pricks! He was just a lad from the North
Side. I think he runs a pool room now down near Wallabout Market. A quiet
fellow, minds his own business. But if you start talking to him about the
war he goes off the handle. He says he'd assassinate the President of the
United States if they ever tried to start another war. Yeah, and he'd do it
too, I'm telling you ... But shit, what was that I wanted to tell you about
Plato? Oh yeah . .."
When the others were gone he'd suddenly shift gears. "You don't believe
in talking like that, do you?" he'd begin. I had to admit I didn't. "You're
wrong," he'd continue. "You've got to keep in with people, you don't know
when you may need one of these guys. You act on the assumption that you're
free, independent! You act as though you were superior to these people.
Well, that's where you make a big mistake. How do you know where you'll be
five years from now, or even six months from now? You might be blind, you
might be run over by a truck, you might be put in the bug-house; you can't
tell what's going to happen to you. Nobody can. You might be as helpless as
a baby..."
"So what?" I would say.
"Well, don't you think it would be good to have a friend when you need
one? You might be so god-damned helpless you'd be glad to have some one help
you across the street. You think these guys are worthless; you think I'm
wasting my time with them. Listen, you never know what a man might do for
you some day. Nobody gets anywhere alone..."
He was touchy about my independence, what he called my indifference. If
I was obliged to ask him for a little dough he was delighted. That gave him
a chance to deliver a little sermon on friendship. "So you have to have
money, too?" he'd say, with a big satisfied grin spreading all over his
face. "So the poet has to eat too? Well, well... It's lucky you came to me.
Henry me boy, because I'm easy with you, I know you, you heartless son of a
bitch. Sure, what do you want? I haven't got very much, but I'll split it
with you. That's fair enough, isn't it? Or do you think, you bastard, that
maybe I ought to give you it all and go out and borrow something for myself?
I suppose you want a good meal, eh? Ham and Eggs wouldn't be good enough,
would it? I suppose you'd like me to drive you to the restaurant too, eh?
Listen, get up from that chair a minute - I want to put a cushion under your
ass. Well, well, so you're broke! Jesus, you're always broke -1 never
remember seeing you with money in your pocket. Listen, don't you ever feel
ashamed of yourself? You talk about those bums I hang out with . . . well
listen, mister, those guys never come and bum me for a dime like you do.
They've got more pride - they'd rather steal it than come and grub it off
me. But you, shit, you're full of high-falutin' ideas, you want to reform
the world and all that crap - you don't want to work for money, no, not you
. . . you expect somebody to hand it to you on a silver platter. Huh! Lucky
there's guys like me around that understand you. You need to get wise to
yourself. Henry. You're dreaming. Everybody wants to eat, don't you know
that? Most people are willing to work for it - they don't lie in bed all day
like you and then suddenly pull on their pants and run to the first friend
at hand. Supposing I wasn't here, what would you have done? Don't answer...
I know what you're going to say. But listen, you can't go on all your life
like that. Sure you talk fine - it's a pleasure to listen to you. You're the
only guy I know that I really enjoy talking to, but where's it going to get
you? One of these days they'll lock you up for vagrancy. You're just a bum,
don't you know that? You're not even as good as those other bums you preach
about. Where are you when I'm in a jam? You can't be found. You don't answer
my letters, you don't answer the telephone, you even hide sometimes when I
come to see you. Listen, I know - you don't have to explain to me. I know
you don't want to hear my stories all the time. But shit, sometimes I really
have to talk to you. A fucking lot you care though. So long as you're out of
the rain and putting another meal under your belt you're happy. You don't
think about your friends - until you're desperate. That's no way to behave,
is it ? Say no and I'll give you a buck. God-damn it. Henry, you're the only
real friend I've got but you're a son of a bitch of a mucker if I know what
I'm talking about. You're just a born good for nothing son of a bitch. You'd
rather starve than turn your hand to something useful..."
Naturally I'd laugh and hold my hand out for the buck he had promised
me. That would irritate him afresh. "You're ready to say anything aren't
you, if only I give you the buck I promised you? What a guy! Talk about
morals - Jesus, you've got the ethics of a rattlesnake. No, I'm not giving
it to you yet, by Christ. I'm going to torture you a little more first. I'm
going to make you earn this money, if I can. Listen what about shining my
shoes - do that for me, will you? They'll never get shined if you don't do
it now." I pick up the shoes and ask him for the brush. I don't mind shining
his shoes, not in the least. But that too seems to incense him. "You're
going to shine them, are you? Well by Jesus, that beats all hell. Listen,
where's your pride - didn't you ever have any? And you're the guy that knows
everything. It's amazing. You know so god-damned much that you have to shine
your friend's shoes to worm a meal out of him. A fine pickle! Here, you
bastard, here's the brush! Shine the other pair too while you're at it."
A pause. He's washing himself at the sink and humming a bit. Suddenly,
in a bright, cheerful tone - "How is it out today, Henry? Is it sunny?
Listen, I've got just the place for you. What do you say to scallops and
bacon with a little tartare sauce on the side? It's a little joint down near
the inlet. A day like today is just the day for scallops and bacon, eh what,
Henry? Don't tell me you've got something to do ... if I haul you down there
you've got to spend a little time with me, you know that, don't you? Jesus,
I wish I had your disposition. You just drift along, from minute to minute.
Sometimes I think you're a damned sight better off than any of us, even if
you are a stinking son of a bitch and a traitor and a thief. When I'm with
you the day seems to pass like a dream. Listen, don't you see what I mean
when I say I've got to see you sometimes? I go nuts being all by myself all
the time. Why do I go chasing around after cunt so much? Why do I play cards
all night? Why do I hang out with those bums from the Point? I need to talk
to some one, that's what."
A little later at the bay, sitting out over the water, with a shot of
rye in him and waiting for the sea food to be served up ... "Life's not so
bad if you can do what you want, eh Henry? If I make a little dough I'm
going to take a trip around the world - and you're coming along with me.
Yes, though you don't deserve it, I'm going to spend some real money on you
one day. I want to see how you'd act if I gave you plenty of rope. I'm going
to give you the money, see... I won't pretend to lend it to you. We'll see
what'll happen to your fine ideas when you have some dough in your pocket.
Listen, when I was talking about Plato the other day I meant to ask you
something: I meant to ask you if you ever read that yam of his about
Atlands. Did you? You did? Well, what do you think of it? Do you think it
was just a yam, or do you think there might have been a place like that
once?"
I didn't dare to tell him that I suspected there were hundreds and
thousands of continents whose existence past or future we hadn't even begun
to dream about, so I simply said I thought it quite possible indeed that
such a place as Atlanris might once have been.
"Well, it doesn't matter much one way or the other, I suppose," he went
on, "but I'll tell you what I think. I think there must have been a time
like that once, a time when men were different. I can't believe that they
always were the pigs they are now and have been for the last few thousand
years. I think it's just possible that there was a time when men knew how to
live, when they knew how to take it easy and to enjoy life. Do you know what
drives me crazy? It's looking at my old man. Ever since he's retired he sits
in front of the fire all day long and mopes. To sit there like a broken-down
gorilla, that's what he slaved for all his life. Well shit, if I thought
that was going to happen to me I'd blow my brains out now. Look around you
... look at the people we know ... do you know one that's worth while?
What's all the fuss about, I'd like to know? We've got to live, they say.
Why ? that's what I want to know. They'd all be a damned sight better off
dead. They're all just so much manure. When the war broke out and I saw them
go off to the trenches I said to myself good, maybe they'll come back with a
little sense! A lot of them didn't come back, of course. But the others! -
listen, do you suppose they got more human, more considerate? Not at all!
They're all butchers at heart, and when they're up against it they squeal.
They make me sick, the whole fucking lot of 'em. I see what they're like,
bailing them out every day. I see it from both sides of the fence. On the
other side it stinks even worse. Why, if I told you some of the things I
knew about the judges who condemn these poor bastards you'd want to slug
them. All you have to do is look at their faces. Yes sir. Henry, I'd like to
think there was once a time when things were different. We haven't seen any
real life - and we're not going to see any. This thing is going to last
another few thousand years, if I know anything about it. You think I'm
mercenary. You think I'm cuckoo to want to earn a lot of money, don't you?
Well I'll tell you, I want to earn a little pile so that I can get my feet
out of this muck. I'd go off and live with a nigger wench if I could get
away from this atmosphere. I've worked my balls off trying to get where I
am, which isn't very far. I don't believe in work any more than you do -1
-was trained that way, that's all. If I could put over a deal, if I could
swindle a pile out of one of these dirty bastards I'm dealing with, I'd do
it with a dear conscience. I know a little too much about the law, that's
the trouble. But I'll fool them yet, you'll see. And when I put it over I'll
put it over big..."
Another shot of rye as the sea food's coming along and he starts in
again. "I meant that about taking you on a trip with me. I'm thinking about
it seriously. I suppose you'll tell me you've got a wife and a kid to look
after. Listen when are you going to break off with that battle-axe of yours?
Don't you know that you've got to ditch her?" He begins to laugh softly.
"Ho! Ho! To think that I was the one who picked her out for you! Did I ever
think you'd be chump enough to get hitched up to her? I thought I was
recommending you a nice piece of tail and you, you poor slob, you marry her.
Ho ho! Listen to me. Henry, while you've got a little sense left: don't let
that sour-balled puss muck up your life for you, do you get me? I don't care
what you do or where you go. I'd hate to see you leave town ... I'd miss
you, I'm telling you that frankly, but Jesus, if you have to go to Africa,
beat it, get out of her clutches, she's no good for you. Sometimes when I
get hold of a good cunt I think to myself now there's something nice for
Henry - and I have in mind to introduce her to you, and then of course I
forget. But Jesus, man, there's thousands of cunts in the world you get
along with. To think that you had to pick on a mean bitch like that .. . Do
you want more bacon? You'd better eat what you want now, you know there
won't be any dough later. Have another drink, eh? Listen, if you try to run
away from me to-day I swear I'll never lend you a cent... What was I saying?
Oh yeah, about that screwy bitch you married. Listen, are you going to do it
or not? Every time I see you you tell me you're going to run away, but you
never do it. You don't think you're supporting her, I hope? She don't need
you, you sap, don't you see that? She just wants to torture you. As for the
kid... well, shit, if I were in your boots I'd drown it. That sounds kind of
mean, doesn't it, but you know what I mean. You're not a father. I don't
know what the hell you are... I just know you're too god-damned good a
fellow to be wasting your life on them. Listen, why don't you try to make
something of yourself? You're young yet and you make a good appearance. Go
off somewhere, way the hell on, and start all over again. If you need a
little money I'll raise it for you. It's like throwing it down a sewer, I
know, but I'll do it for you just the same. The truth is. Henry, I like you
a hell of a lot. I've taken more from you than I would from anybody in the
world. I guess we have a lot in common, coming from the old neighbourhood.
Funny I didn't know you in those days. Shit, I'm getting sentimental..."
The day wore on like that, with lots to eat and drink, the sun out
strong, a car to tote us around, cigars in between, dozing a little on the
beach studying the cunts passing by, talking, laughing, singing a bit too -
one of many, many days I spent like that with MacGregor. Days like that
really seemed to make the wheel stop. On the surface it was jolly and happy
go lucky; time passing like a sticky dream. But underneath it was
fatalistic, premonitory, leaving me the next day morbid and restless. I knew
very well I'd have to make a break some day; I knew very well I was pissing
my time away. But I knew also that there was nothing I could do about it -
yet. Something had to happen, something big, something that would sweep me
off my feet. All I needed was a push, but it had to be some force outside my
world that could give me the right push, that I was certain of. I couldn't
eat my heart out, because it wasn't in my nature. All my life things had
worked out all right - in the end. It wasn't in the cards for me to exert
myself. Something had to be left to Providence - in my case a whole lot.
Despite all the outward manifestations of misfortune or mismanagement I knew
that I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth. And with a double crown
too. The external situation was bad, admitted - but what bothered me more
was the internal situation. I was really afraid of myself, of my appetite,
my curiosity, my flexibility, my permeability, my malleability, my
geniality, my powers of adaptation. No situation in itself could frighten
me: I somehow always saw myself sitting pretty, sitting inside a buttercup,
as it were and sipping the honey. Even if I were flung in jail I had a hunch
I'd enjoy it. It was because I knew how not to resist, I suppose. Other
people wore themselves out tugging and straining and pulling; my strategy
was to float with the tide. What people did to me didn't bother me nearly so
much as what they were doing to others or to themselves. I was really so
damned well off inside that I had to take on the problems of the world. And
that's why I was in a mess all the time. I wasn't synchronized with my own
destiny, so to speak. I was trying to live out the world destiny. If I got
home of an evening, for instance, and there was no food in the house, not
even for the kid, I would turn right around and go looking for the food. But
what I noticed about myself, and that was what puzzled me, was that no
sooner outside and hustling for the grub than I was back at the
Weltanschauung again. I didn't think of food for us exclusively, I thought
of food in general, food in all its stages, everywhere in the world at that
hour, and how it was gotten and how it was prepared and what people did if
they didn't have it and how maybe there was a way to fix it so that
everybody would have it when they wanted it and no more time wasted on such
an idiotically simple problem. I felt sorry for the wife and kid, sure, but
also felt sorry for the Hottentots and the Australian Bushmen, not to
mention the starving Belgians and the Turks and the Armenians. I felt sorry
for the human race, for the stupidity of man and his lack of imagination.
Missing a meal wasn't so terrible - it was the ghastly emptiness of the
street that disturbed me profoundly. All those bloody houses, one like
another, and all so empty and cheerless-looking. Fine paving stones under
foot and asphalt in the middle of the street and
beautifully-hideously-elegant brown-stone stoops to walk up, and yet a guy
could walk about all day and all night on this expensive material and be
looking for a crust of bread. That's what got me. The incongruousness of it.
If one could only dash out with a dinner bell and yell "Listen, listen,
people, I'm a guy what's hungry. Who wants shoes shined? Who wants the
garbage brought out? Who wants the drainpipes cleaned out?" If you could
only go out in the street and put it to them dear like that. But no, you
don't dare to open your trap. If you tell a guy in the street you're hungry
you scare the shit out of him, he runs like hell. That's something I never
understood. I don't understand it yet. The whole thing is so simple - you
just say Yes when some one comes up to you. And if you can't say Yes you can
take him by the arm and ask some other bird to help you out. Why you have to
don a uniform and kill men you don't know, just to get that crust of bread,
is a mystery to me. That's what I think about, more than about whose trap
it's going down or how much it costs. Why should I give a fuck about what
anything costs ? I'm here to live, not to calculate. And that's just what
the bastards don't want you to do - to live! They want you to spend your
whole life adding up figures. That makes sense to them. That's reasonable.
That's intelligent. If I were running the boat things wouldn't be so orderly
perhaps, but it would be gayer, by Jesus! You wouldn't have to shit in your
pants over trifles. Maybe there wouldn't be macadamized roads and
streamlined cars and loudspeakers and gadgets of a million-billion
varieties, maybe there wouldn't even be glass in the windows, maybe you'd
have to sleep on the ground, maybe there wouldn't be French cooking and
Italian cooking and Chinese cooking, maybe people would kill each other when
their patience was exhausted and maybe nobody would stop them because there
wouldn't be any jails or any cops or judges, and there certainly wouldn't be
any cabinet ministers or legislatures because-there wouldn't be any
goddamned laws to obey or disobey, and maybe it would take months and years
to trek from place to place, but you wouldn't need a visa or a passport or a
carte d'identite because you wouldn't be registered anywhere and you
wouldn't bear a number and if you wanted to change your name every week you
could do it because it wouldn't make any difference since you wouldn't own
anything except what you could carry around with you and why would you want
to own anything when everything would be free? During this period when I was
drifting from door to door, job to job, friend to friend, meal to meal, I
did try nevertheless to rope off a little space for myself which might be an
anchorage; it was more like a lifebuoy in the midst of a swift channel. To
get within a mile of me was to hear a huge dolorous bell tolling. Nobody
could see the anchorage - it was buried deep in the bottom of the channel.
One saw me bobbing up and down on the surface, rocking gently sometimes or
else swinging backwards and forwards agitatedly. What held me down safely
was the big pigeon-holed desk which I put in the parlour. This was the desk
which had been in the old man's tailoring establishment for the last fifty
years, which had given birth to many bills and many groans, which had housed
strange souvenirs in its compartments, and which finally I had filched from
him when he was ill and away from the establishment; and now it stood
in the middle of the floor in our lugubrious parlour on the third floor of a
respectable brown-stone house in the dead centre of the most respectable
neighbourhood in Brooklyn. I had to fight a tough battle to install it
there, but I insisted that it be there in the midmost midst of the shebang.
It was like putting a mastodon in the centre of a dentist's office. But
since the wife had no friends to visit her and since my friends didn't give
a fuck if it were suspended from the chandelier, I kept it in the parlour
and I put all the extra chairs we bad around it in a big circle and then I
sat down comfortably and I put my feet up on the desk and dreamed of what I
would write if I could write. I had a spittoon alongside of the desk, a big
brass one from the same establishment, and I would spit in it now and then
to remind myself that it was there. All the pigeon-holes were empty and all
the drawers were empty; there wasn't a thing on the desk or in it except a
sheet of white paper on which I found it impossible to put so much as a
pothook.
When I think of the titanic efforts I made to canalize the hot lava
which was bubbling inside me, the efforts I repeated thousands of times to
bring the funnel into place and capture a word, a phrase, I think inevitably
of the men of the old stone age. A hundred thousand, two hundred thousand
years, three hundred thousand years to arrive at the idea of the paleolith.
A phantom struggle, because they weren't dreaming of such a thing as the
paleolith. It came without effort, born of a second, a miracle you might
say, except that everything which happens is miraculous. Things happen or
they don't happen, that's all. Nothing is accomplished by sweat and
struggle. Nearly everything which we call life is just insomnia, an agony
because we've lost the habit of falling asleep. We don't know how to let go.
We're like a Jack-in-the-box perched on top of a spring and the more we
struggle the harder it is to get back in the box.
I think if I had been crazy I couldn't have hit upon a better scheme to
consolidate my anchorage than to install this Neanderthal object in the
middle of the parlour. With my feet on the desk, picking up the current, and
my spinal column snugly socketed in a thick leather cushion, I was in an
ideal relation to the flotsam and jetsam which was whirling about me, and
which, because they were crazy and part of the flux, my friends were trying
to convince me was life. I remember vividly the first contact with reality
that I got through my feet, so to speak. The million words or so which I had
written, mind you, well ordered, well connected, were as nothing to me -
crude ciphers from the old stone age - because the contact was through the
head and the head is a useless appendage unless you're anchored in
mid-channel deep in the mud. Everything I had written before was museum
stuff, and most writing is still museum stuff and that's why it doesn't
catch fire, doesn't inflame the world. I was only a mouthpiece for the
ancestral race which was talking through me; even my dreams were not
authentic, not bona fide Henry Miller dreams. To sit still and think one
thought which would come up out of me, out of the lifebuoy, was a Herculean
task. I didn't lack thoughts nor words nor the power of expression - I
lacked something much more important: the lever which would shut off the
juice. The bloody machine wouldn't stop, that was the difficulty. I was not
only in the middle of the current but the current was running through me and
I had no control over it whatever.
I remember the day I brought the machine to a dead stop and how the
other mechanism, the one that was signed with my own initials and which I
had made with my own hands and my own blood slowly began to function. I had
gone to the theatre nearby to see a vaudeville show; it was the matinee and
I had a ticket for the balcony. Standing on line in the lobby, I already
experienced a strange feeling of consistency. It was as though I were
coagulating, becoming a recognizable consistent mass of jelly. It was like
the ultimate stage in the healing of a wound. I was at the height of
normality, which is a very abnormal condition. Cholera might come and blow
its foul breath in my mouth - it wouldn't matter. I might bend over and kiss
the ulcers of a leprous hand, and no harm could possibly come to me. There
was not just a balance in this constant warfare between health and disease,
which is all that most of us may hope for, but there was a plus integer in
the blood which meant that, for a few moments at least, disease was
completely routed. If one had the wisdom to take root in such a moment, one
would never again be ill or unhappy or even die. But to leap to this
conclusion is to make a jump which would take one back farther than the old
stone age. At that moment I wasn't even dreaming of taking root;
I was experiencing for the first time in my life the meaning of the
miraculous. I was so amazed when I heard my own cogs meshing that I was
willing to die then and there for the privilege of the experience.
What happened was this ... As I passed the doorman holding the torn
stub in my hand the lights were dimmed and the curtains sent up. I stood a
moment slightly dazed by the sudden darkness. As the curtain slowly rose I
had the feeling that throughout the ages man had always been mysteriously
stilled by this brief moment which preludes the spectacle. I could feel the
curtain rising in man. And immediately I also realized that this was a
symbol which was being presented to him endlessly in his sleep and that if
he had been awake the players would never have taken the stage but he, Man,
would have mounted the boards. I didn't think this thought - it was a
realization, as I say, and so simple and overwhelmingly clear was it that
the machine stopped dead instantly and I was standing in my own presence
bathed in a luminous reality. I turned my eyes away from the stage and
beheld the marble staircase which I should take to go to my seat in the
balcony. I saw a man slowly mounting the steps, his hand laid across the
balustrade. The man could have been myself, the old self which had been
sleepwalking ever since I was born. My eye didn't take in the entire
staircase, just the few steps which the man had climbed or was climbing in
the moment that I took it all in. The man never reached the top of the
stairs and his hand was never removed from the marble balustrade. I felt the
curtain descend, and for another few moments I was behind the scenes moving
amidst the sets, like the property man suddenly roused from his sleep and
not sure whether he is still dreaming or looking at a dream which is being
enacted on the stage. It was as fresh and green, as strangely new as the
bread and cheese lands which the Biddenden maidens saw every day of their
long life joined at the hips. I saw only that which was alive! the rest
faded out in a penumbra. And it was in order to keep the world alive that I
rushed home without waiting to see the performance and sat down to describe
the little patch of staircase which is imperishable.
It was just about this time that the Dadaists were in full swing, to be
followed shortly by the Surrealists. I never heard of either group until
some ten years later; I never read a French book and I never had a French
idea. I was perhaps the unique Dadaist in America, and I didn't know it. I
might just as well have been living in the jungles of the Amazon for all the
contact I had with the outside world. Nobody understood what I was writing
about or why I wrote that way. I was so lucid that they said I was daffy. I
was describing the New World - unfortunately a little too soon because it
had not yet been discovered and nobody could be persuaded that it existed.
It was an ovarian world, still hidden away in the Fallopian tubes. Naturally
nothing was dearly formulated: there was only the faint suggestion of a
backbone visible, and certainly no arms or legs, no hair, no nails, no
teeth. Sex was the last thing to be dreamed of; it was the world of Chronos
and his ovicular progeny. It was the world of the iota, each iota being
indispensable, frighteningly logical, and absolutely unpredictable. There
was no such thing as a thing, because the concept "thing" was missing.
I say it was a New World I was describing, but like the New World which
Columbus discovered it turned out to be a far older world than any we have
known. I saw beneath the superficial physiognomy of skin and bone the
indestructible world which man has always carried within him; it was neither
old nor new, really, but the eternally true world which changes from moment
to moment. Everything I looked at was palimpsest and there was no layer of
writing too strange for me to decipher. When my companions left me of an
evening I would often sit down and write to my friends the Australian
Bushmen or to the Mound Builders of the Mississippi Valley or to the
Igorotes in the Philippines. I had to write English, naturally, because it
was the only language I spoke, but between my language and the telegraphic
code employed by my bosom friends there was a world of difference. Any
primitive man would have understood me, any man of archaic epochs would have
understood me: only those about me, that is to say, a continent of a hundred
million people, failed to understand my language. To write intelligibly for
them I would have been obliged first of all to kill something, secondly, to
arrest time. I had just made the realization that life is indestructible and
that there is no such thing as time, only the present. Did they expect me to
deny a truth which it had taken me all my life to catch a glimpse of? They
most certainly did. The one thing they did not want to hear about was that
life is indestructible. Was not their precious new world reared on the
destruction of the innocent, on rape and plunder and torture and
devastation? Both continents had been violated; both continents had been
stripped and plundered of all that was precious - in things. No greater
humiliation, it seems to me, was meted out to any man than to Montezuma; no
race was ever more ruthlessly wiped out than the American Indian; no land
was ever raped in the foul and bloody way that California was raped by the
gold-diggers. I blush to think of our origins - our hands are steeped in
blood and crime. And there is no let-up to the slaughter and the pillage, as
I discovered at first hand travelling throughout the length and breadth of
the land. Down to the closest friend every man is a potential murderer.
Often it wasn't necessary to bring out the gun or the lasso or the branding
iron - they had found subtler and more devilish ways of torturing and
killing their own. For me the most excruciating agony was to have the word
annihilated before it had even left my mouth. I learned, by bitter
experience, to hold my tongue; I learned to sit in silence, and even smile,
when actually I was foaming at the mouth. I learned to shake hands and say
how do you do to all these innocent-looking fiends who were only waiting for
me to sit down in order to suck my blood.
How was it possible, when I sat down in the parlour at my prehistoric
desk, to use this code language of rape and murder? I was alone in this
great hemisphere of violence, but I was not alone as far as the human race
was concerned. I was lonely amidst a world of things lit up by
phosphorescent flashes of cruelty. I was delirious with an energy which
could not be unleashed except in the service of death and futility. I could
not begin with a full statement - it would have meant the strait-jacket or
the electric chair. I was like a man who had been too long incarcerated in a
dungeon - I had to feel my way slowly, falteringly, lest I stumble and be
run over. I had to accustom myself gradually to the penalties which freedom
involves. I had to grow a new epidermis which would protect me from this
burning light in the sky.
The ovarian world is the product of a life rhythm. The moment a child
is born it becomes part of a world in which there is not only the life
rhythm but the death rhythm. The frantic desire to live, to live at any
cost, is not a result of the life rhythm in us, but of the death rhythm.
There is not only no need to keep alive at any price, but, if life is
undesirable, it is absolutely wrong. This keeping oneself alive, out of a
blind urge to defeat death, is in itself a means of sowing death. Every one
who has not fully accepted life, who is not incrementing life, is helping to
fill the world with death. To make the simplest gesture with the hand can
convey the utmost sense of life; a word spoken with the whole being can give
life. Activity in itself means nothing: it is often a sign of death. By
simple external pressure, by force of surroundings and example, by the very
climate which activity engenders, one can become part of a monstrous death
machine, such as America, for example. What does a dynamo know of life, of
peace, of reality? What does any individual American dynamo know of the
wisdom and energy, of the life abundant and eternal possessed by a ragged
beggar sitting under a tree in the act of meditation? What is energy? What
is life? One has only to read the stupid twaddle of the scientific and
philosophic textbooks to realize how less than nothing is the wisdom of
these energetic Americans. Listen, they had me on the run, these crazy
horsepower fiends; in order to break their insane rhythm, their death
rhythm, I had to resort to a wavelength which, until I found the proper
sustenance in my own bowels, would at least nullify the rhythm they had set
up. Certainly I did not need this grotesque, cumbersome, antediluvian desk
which I had installed in the parlour; certainly I didn't need twelve empty
chairs placed around in a semicircle; I needed only elbow room in which to
write and a thirteenth chair which would take me out of the zodiac they were
using and put me in a heaven beyond heaven. But when you drive a man almost
crazy and when, to his own surprise perhaps, he finds that he still has some
resistance, some powers of his own, then you are apt to find such a man
acting very much like a primitive being. Such a man is apt not only to
become stubborn and dogged, but superstitious, a believer in magic and a
practiser of magic. Such a man is beyond religion - it is his religiousness
he is suffering from. Such a man becomes a monomaniac, bent on doing one
thing only and that is to break the evil spell which has been put upon him.
Such a man is beyond throwing bombs, beyond revolt; he wants to stop
reacting, whether inertly or ferociously. This man, of all men on earth,
wants the act to be a manifestation of life. If, in the realization of his
terrible need, he begins to act regressively, to become unsocial, to stammer
and stutter, to prove so utterly unadapted as to be incapable of earning a
living, know that this man has found his way back to the womb and source of
life and that tomorrow, instead of the contemptible object of ridicule which
you have made of him, he will stand forth as a mm in his own right and all
the powers of the world will be of no avail against him.
Out of the crude cipher with which he communicates from his prehistoric
desk with the archaic men of the world a new language builds up which cuts
through the death language of the day like wireless through a storm. There
is no magic in this wavelength any more than there is magic in the womb. Men
are lonely and out of communication with one another because all their
inventions speak only of death. Death is the automaton which rules the world
of activity. Death is silent, because it has no mouth. Death has never
expressed anything. Death is wonderful too - after life. Only one like
myself who has opened his mouth and spoken, only one who has said Yes, Yes,
Yes, and again Yes! can open wide his arms to death and know no fear. Death
as a reward, yes! Death as a result of fulfillment, yes! Death as a crown
and shield, yes! But not death from the roots, isolating men, making them
bitter and fearful and lonely, giving them fruitless energy, filling them
with a will which can only say No! The first word any man writes when he has
found himself, his own rhythm, which is the life rhythm is Yes! Everything
he writes thereafter is Yes, Yes, Yes - Yes in a thousand million ways. No
dynamo, no matter how huge - not even a dynamo of a hundred million dead
souls - can combat one man saying Yes!
The war was on and men were being slaughtered, one million, two
million, five million, ten million, twenty million, finally a hundred
million, then a billion, everybody, man, woman and child, down to the last
one. "No!" they were shouting, "No! they shall not pass!" And yet everybody
passed; everybody got a free pass, whether he shouted Yes or No. In the
midst of this triumphant demonstration of spiritually destructive osmosis I
sat with my feet planted on the big desk trying to communicate with Zeus the
Father of Atlantis and with his lost progeny, ignorant of the fact that
Apollinaire was to die the day before the Armistice in a military hospital,
ignorant of the fact that in his "new writing" he had penned these indelible
lines, "Be forbearing when you compare us
With those who were the perfection of order.
We who everywhere seek adventure,
We are not your enemies.
We would give you vast and strange domains
Where flowering mystery waits for him would pluck it."
Ignorant that in this same poem he had also written:
"Have compassion on us who are always fighting on the frontiers Of the
boundless future,
Compassion for our errors, compassion for our sins." I was ignorant of
the fact that there were men then living who went by the outlandish names of
Blaise Cendrars, Jacques Vache, Louis Aragon, Tristan Tzara, Rene Crevel,
Henri de Montherlant, Andre Breton, Max Ernst, George Grosz; ignorant of the
fact that on July, 14,1916, at the Saal Waag, in Zurich, the first Dada
Manifesto had been proclaimed -"manifesto by monsieur antipyrine" - that in
this strange document it was stated "Dada is life without slippers or
parallel . . . severe necessity without discipline or morality and we spit
on humanity." Ignorant of the fact that the Dada Manifesto of 1918 contained
these lines. "I am writing a manifesto and I want nothing, yet I say certain
things, and I am against manifestoes as a matter of principle, as I am also
against principles ... I write this manifesto to show that one