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
