The Enormous Womb, Henry Miller
The Enormous Womb
AS THE dictionary says, the womb is the place where anything is engendered or brought to life. As far as I can make out, there is never anything but womb.
First and last there is the womb of Nature; then there is the mother’s womb; and finally there is the womb in which we have our life and being and which we call the world.
It is the failure to recognize the world as womb which is the cause of our misery, in large part.
We think of the child unborn as living in a state of bliss; we think of death as an escape from life’s ills; but life itself we still refuse to regard as bliss and security. And yet, in this world about is not everything being engendered and brought to life?
Perhaps it is only another of our illusions that the grave be regarded as a refuge and the nine months preceding birth as bliss. Who knows anything about the uterine life or the life hereafter?
Yet somehow the idea has caught hold, and probably it will never perish, that these two states of unconsciousness mean freedom from pain and struggle, and hence bliss. On the other hand we know from experience that there are people alive and moving about who live in what is called a state of bliss.
Are they more unconscious than the rest, or less so? I think most of us would agree that they are less unconscious. Wherein are their lives different then from that of the ordinary run of mankind?
To my way of thinking the difference lies in their attitude towards the world, lies in the supreme fact that they have accepted the world as a womb, and not a tomb. For they seem neither to regret what has passed nor to fear what is to come. They live in an intense state of awareness and yet are apparently without fear.
It has been said that fear, which plays such a dominant role in our lives, was once a vague, nameless thing, an echo, one might almost say, of the life instinct. It has been said that with the development of civilization this nameless fear gradually crystallized into a fear of death.
And that in the highest reaches of civilization this fear of death becomes a fear of life, as exemplified by the behavior of the neurotic. Now there is nothing strange about fear: no matter in what guise it presents itself it is something with which we are all so familiar that when a man appears who is without it we are at once enslaved by him.
There have been less than a handful of such men in the history of man. Whether they were forces for good or evil matters little: the fear which they awaken is the fear of the monster.
In truth they were all monsters, whether they be called Tamerlane, Buddha, Christ or Napoleon. They were heroic figures, and the hero, according to myths was always born supernaturally. The hero, in short, is one who was spared the shock of birth.
The hero then is a sort of monster who is immune to pain and suffering: he is on the side of life. The world is for him a place where things are engendered, brought to life. Life reveals itself to him as art, and not as an ordeal.
He enjoys life by rearranging it according to his own needs. He may say that he is doing it for others, for humanity, but we know that he is also a liar. The hero is a man who says to himself—this is where things happen, not somewhere else. He acts as if he were at home in the world.
Such behavior, of course, brings about a terrific confusion, for as you may have noticed, people are seldom at home, always somewhere else, always “absent.” Life, as it is called, is for most of us one long postponement. And the simple reason for it is: FEAR.
As we see whenever a war breaks out, the fear of war is overcome the moment one is really in it. If war were really as terrible as people imagine it to be it would have been wiped out long ago.
To make war is as natural for human beings as to make love. Love can make cowards of men just as much as the fear of war. But once desperately in love a man will commit any crime and not only feel justified, but feel good about it. It is in the order of things.
The wisest men are those who speak of illusion: MAYA. Illusion is the antidote to fear. In harness they render life absurdly illogical. But it is just this antinomian quality of life which keeps us going, which sends us shuttling back and forth from one womb to another.
The world, which is not just the human world, is the womb of all, of birth and of life and of death.
It is this third and all-inclusive womb, THE WORLD, which man is perpetually striving to make himself a part of. It is the original chaos, the seat of creation itself. No man ever fully attains it. It is a condition of IS known neither to the foetus nor to the corpse. But it is known to the soul, and if it be unrealizable it is none the less true.
Curiously enough the verb which expresses being is in our language an intransitive verb. Most people think it quite natural that the verb to be should be an intransitive one. And yet there are languages, as we know, which make no distinction between transitive and intransitive. The spirit of these languages is more deeply rooted in symbol.
Since it is only through symbolism that we apprehend anything profoundly, the more precise and conceptual a language becomes the more sterile does it become. The modern tongues, all of them, reflect more and more the death in us.
They reflect only too clearly the fact that we regard life itself as a vestibule, whether to heaven or to hell makes little difference. It was against this stagnant automatism which Lawrence fought all his life; it is this surrender to the death instincts which enrages a man like Céline.
Real death is not a source of terror for the ordinary, intelligent, sensitive being. It is living death which is the great nightmare. Living death means the interruption of the current of life, the forestalling of a natural death process.
It is a negative way of recognizing that the world is really nothing but a great womb, the place where everything is brought to life.
Everything that lives has will, that is, creativeness. Will is in the verb, which is the most important adjunct of our speech: a verb is ipso facto transitive. A verb, however, can be made intransitive, as the will can be rendered powerless, by the mind.
But by its nature a verb is the symbol of action, regardless of whether the action be doing, having, breathing, or being.
Actually there is nothing but a steady stream of activity, a movement towards or away from life. This activity continues even in death, therein proving often to be the most fructifying of all activity. We have no real language for death, since we know nothing of it, have never experienced it; we have only thought concepts, counter-symbols which are expressive of life in a negative fashion.
All that we really know is becoming, the endless change and transformation. Things are constantly being recreated. The real fear, the real terror, lies in the idea of arrest. It is a living idea of death.
Some people are born dead. Some people impress us as only half-alive. Others again seem radiant with energy. Whether one is on the side of life or on the side of death makes no difference. Life is just as wonderful on the minus side as on the plus side.
The real miracle is to stand still. That would mean becoming God, or dead-alive. That is the only possible escape from the womb, and that of course is why the notion of God is so ingrained in the human consciousness. God is summation, which is the same as saying cessation. God does not represent life, but fulfillment, which is the only legitimate form of death.
In this legitimate form of death, which I say lies behind the notion of fulfillment, there is the completest subservience to the life instinct. This is the idea which has obsessed all the religious maniacs, the very sensible one that only in living a thing out to the full can there be an end. It is a wholly unmoral idea, a thoroughly artistic one.
The greatest artists have been the immoralists, that is, the ones who have been in favor of living it out. Of course they were immediately misunderstood by their disciples, by those who go about preaching in their name, disseminating the gospel of this or that. The idea with which these great religious figures were imbued is that of bringing things to an end. They were all ridden with an obsession about suffering.
The idea that the womb might be a place of torture or punishment is a fairly recent one. I mean by that only a few thousand years old. It goes hand in hand with the loss of innocence. All ideas of Paradise involve the conquest of fear. Paradise is always a condition that is earned or won through struggle. The elimination of struggle is the greatest struggle of all—the struggle not to struggle.
For struggle, whether erroneously or not, has to do with birth. But there was
