Because Herr Nagel was the unacknowledged saint which every artist is – the man who is ridiculed because his solutions, which are truly profound, seem too simple for the world. No man wants to be an artist – he is driven to it because the world refuses to recognize his proper leadership. Work meant nothing to me, because the real work to be done was being evaded. People regarded me as lazy and shiftless, but on the contrary I was an exceedingly active individual. Even if it was just hunting for a piece of tail, that was something, and well worth while, especially if compared to other forms of activity -such as making buttons or turning screws, or even removing appendixes. And why did people listen to me so readily when I applied for a job? Why did they find me entertaining? For the reason, no doubt, that I had always spent my time profitably. I brought them gifts – from my hours at the public library, from my idle ramblings through the streets, from my intimate experiences with women, from my afternoons at the burlesque, from my visits to the museum and the art galleries. Had I been a dud, just a poor honest bugger who wanted to work his balls off for so much a week, they wouldn’t have offered me the jobs they did, nor would they have handed me cigars or taken me to lunch or loaned me money as they frequently did. I must have had something to offer which perhaps unknowingly they prized beyond horsepower or technical ability. I didn’t know myself what it was, because I had neither pride, nor vanity, nor envy. About the big issues I was dear, but confronted by the petty details of life I was bewildered. I had to witness this same bewilderment on a colossal scale before I could grasp what it was all about Ordinary men are often quicker in sizing up the practical situation: their ego is commensurate with the demands made upon it: the world is not very different from what they imagine it to be. But a man who is completely out of step with the rest of the world is either suffering from a colossal inflation of his ego or else the ego is so submerged as to be practically non-existent. Herr Nagel had to dive off the deep end in search of his true ego; his existence was a mystery, to himself and to every one else. I couldn’t afford to leave things hanging in suspense that way – the mystery was too intriguing. Even if I had to rub myself like a cat against every human being I encountered, I was going to get to the bottom of it. Rub long enough and hard enough and the spark will come!
The hibernation of animals, the suspension of life practised by certain low forms of life, the marvellous vitality of the bedbug which lies in wait endlessly behind the wallpaper, the trance of the Yogi, the catalepsy of the pathologic individual, the mystic’s union with the cosmos, the immortality of cellular life, all these things the artist learns in order to awaken the world at the propitious moment. The artist belongs to the X root race of man; he is the spiritual microbe, as it were, which carries over from one root race to another. He is not crushed by misfortune, because he is not a part of the physical, racial scheme of things. His appearance is always synchronous with catastrophe and dissolution; he is the cyclical being which lives in the epicycle. The experience which he acquires is never used for personal ends; it serves the larger purpose to which he is geared.
Nothing is lost on him, however trifling. If he is interrupted for twenty-five years in the reading of a book he can go on from the page where he left off as though nothing had happened in between. Everything that happens in between, which is “life” to most people, is merely an interruption in his forward round. The eternality of his work, when he expresses himself, is merely the reflection of the automatism of life in which he is obliged to lie dormant, a sleeper on the back of sleep, waiting for the signal which will announce the moment of birth. This is the big issue, and this was always dear to me, even when I denied it. The dissatisfaction which drives one on from one word to another, one creation to another, is simply a protest against the futility of postponement. The more awake one becomes, an artistic microbe, the less desire one has to do anything. Fully awake, everything is just and there is no need to come out of the trance. Action, as expressed in creating a work of art, is a concession to the automatic principle of death.
Drowning myself in the Gulf of Mexico I was able to partake of an active life which would permit the real self to hibernate a until I was ripe to be born. I understood it perfectly, though I acted blindly and confusedly. I swam back to the stream of human activity until I got to the source of all action and there muscled in, calling myself personnel director of a telegraph company, and allowed the tide of humanity to wash over me like great white-capped breakers. All this active life, preceding the final act of desperation, led me from doubt to doubt, blinding me more and more to the real self which, like a continent choked with the evidences of a great and thriving civilization, had already sunk beneath the surface of the sea. The colossal ego was submerged, and what people observed moving frantically above the surface was the periscope of the soul searching for its target. Everything that came within range had to be destroyed, if I were ever to rise again and ride the waves. This monster which rose now and then to fix its target with deadly aim, which dove again and roved and plundered ceaselessly would, when the time came, rise for the last time to reveal itself as an ark, would gather unto itself a pair of each kind and at last, when the floods abated, would settle down on the summit of a lofty mountain peak thence to open wide its doors and return to the world what had been preserved from the catastrophe.
If I shudder now and then, when I think of my active life, if I have nightmares, possibly it is because I think of all the men I robbed and murdered in my day sleep. I did everything which my nature bade me to do. Nature is eternally whispering in one’s ear – “if you would survive you must kill!” Being human, you kill not like the animal but automatically, and the killing is disguised and its ramifications are endless, so that you kill without even thinking about it, you kill without need. The men who are the most honoured are the greatest killers. They believe that they are serving their fellowmen, and they are sincere in believing so, but they are heartless murderers and at moments, when they come awake, they realize their crimes and perform frantic, quixotic acts of goodness in order to expiate their guilt. The goodness of man stinks more than the evil which is in him, for the goodness is not yet acknowledged, not an affirmation of the conscious self. Being pushed over the precipice, it is easy at the last moment to surrender all one’s possessions, to turn and extend a last embrace to all who are left behind. How are we to stop the blind rush? How are we to stop the automatic process, each one pushing the other over the precipice?
As I sat at my desk, over which I had put up a sign reading “Do not abandon all hope ye who enter here!” – as I sat there saying Yes, No, Yes, No, I realized, with a despair that was turning to white frenzy, that I was a puppet in whose hands society had placed a gatling gun. If I performed
