Tropic of Capricorn

by Henry Miller

things were wrong usually only when one cared too much.

Wherever I went I fomented discord—not because I was idealistic but because I was like a searchlight exposing the stupidity and futility of everything. Besides, I wasn’t a good ass licker. That marked me, no doubt.

I traveled around the world at lightning speed, and I learned that everywhere it is the same—hunger, humiliation, ignorance, vice, greed, extortion, chicanery, torture, despotism: the inhumanity of man to man: the fetters, the harness, the halter, the bridle, the whip, the spurs. The finer the caliber the worse off the man.

Often it happens, as in Russia, that a man came in with a chip on his shoulder. He woke up that way, as if struck by a monsoon. Nine times out of ten he was a good fellow, a fellow whom everyone liked. But when the rage came on nothing could stop him. He was like a horse with the blind staggers and the best thing you could do for him was to shoot him on the spot. It always happens that way with peaceable people. One day they run amok. In America they’re constantly running amok. What they need is an outlet for their energy, for their blood lust. Europe is bled regularly by war. America is pacifistic and cannibalistic. Outwardly it seems to be a beautiful honeycomb, with all the drones crawling over each other in a frenzy of work; inwardly it’s a slaughterhouse, each man killing off his neighbor and sucking the juice from his bones. Superficially it looks like a bold, masculine world; actually it’s a whorehouse run by women, with the native sons acting as pimps and the bloody foreigners selling their flesh. Nobody knows what it is to sit on his ass and be content. That happens only in the films where everything is faked, even the fires of hell. The whole continent is sound asleep and in that sleep a grand nightmare is taking place.

soft as putty.

To be accepted and appreciated you must nullify yourself, make yourself indistinguishable from the herd. You may dream, if you dream alike. But if you dream something different you are not in America, of America American, but a Hottentot in Africa, or a Kalmuck, or a chimpanzee. The moment you have a “different” thought you cease to be an American. And the moment you become something different you find yourself in Alaska or Easter Island or Iceland.

To go beyond the ordained limits of joy or grief was wicked. To threaten madness was the high sin. They had a terrific animal sense of adjustment, marvelous to behold if it had been truly animal, horrible to witness when you realized that it was nothing more than dull German torpor, insensitivity.

I have no thoughts, no dreams, no desires. I am thoroughly healthy and empty. I am a nonentity. I am so thoroughly alive and healthy that I am like the luscious deceptive fruit which hangs on the Californian trees. One more ray of sun and I will be rotten. “Pourri avant d’etre muri!”

“Feed all things with food convenient for them—that is, if the food be procurable. The food of thy soul is light and space; feed it then on light and space. But the food of the body is champagne and oysters; feed it then on champagne and oysters; and so shall it merit a joyful resurrection, if there is any to be.”

And what created this inexhaustible reservoir of energy? An illumination. Yes, it happened in the twinkling of an eye, which is the only way that anything important ever does happen.

prim,

priggish

highfalutin’

nonchalantly

impasse

I began to realize that thinking, when it is not masturbative, is lenitive, healing, pleasurable. The thinking that gets you nowhere takes you everywhere; all other thinking is done on tracks and no matter how long the stretch, in the end there is always the depot or the roundhouse. In the end there is always a red lantern which says STOP! But when the penis gets to thinking there is no stop or let: it is a perpetual holiday, the bait fresh and the fish always nibbling at the line.

What is unmentionable is pure fuck and pure cunt: it must be mentioned only in deluxe editions, otherwise the world will fall apart.

My name? Why just call me God—God the embryo.

Creative Evolution.

love was conjunctivitis of the mandibles, clutch this, clutch that, clutch, clutch, the mandibular clutch-clutch of the mandala wheel of lust.

I swam after her and as we got to the side of the boat, which I was afraid she would capsize, I got hold of her round the waist with my one hand and I started to talk to her calmly and soothingly, as though I was talking to a child. “Go away from me,” she said, “you’re an atheist!” Jesus, you could have knocked me over with a feather, so astonished I was to hear that. So that was it? All that hysteria because I was insulting the Lord Almighty. I felt like batting her one in the eye to bring her to her senses. But we were out over our heads and I had a fear that she would do some mad thing like pulling the boat over our heads if I didn’t handle her right. So I pretended that I was terribly sorry and I said I didn’t mean a word of it, that I had been scared to death, and so on and so forth, and as I talked to her gently, soothingly, I slipped my hand down from her waist and I gently stroked her ass. That was what she wanted all right. She was talking to me blubberingly about what a good Catholic she was and how she had tried not to sin, and maybe she was so wrapped up in what she was saying she didn’t know what I was doing, but just the same when I got my hand in her crotch and said all the beautiful things I could think of, about God, about love, about going to church and confessing and all that crap, she must have felt something because I had a good three fingers inside her and working them around like drunken bobbins.

ninny

coyly,

cantankerous

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 bughouse; 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 goddamned 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....”

vagrancy.

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...

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.

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.

Apollinaire

Blaise Cendrars, Jacques Vache, Louis Aragon, Tristan Tzara, Rene Crevel, Henri de Montherlant, Andre Breton, Max Ernst, Georges 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 may perform opposed actions together, in a single fresh respiration; I am against action; for continual contradiction, for affirmation also, I am neither for nor against and I do not explain for I hate good sense.... There is a literature which does not reach the voracious mass. The work of creators, sprung from a real necessity on the part of the author, and for himself. Consciousness of a supreme egotism where the stars waste away.... Each page must explode, either with the profoundly serious and heavy, the whirlwind, dizziness, the new, the eternal, with the overwhelming hoax, with an enthusiasm for principles or with the mode of typography. On the one hand a staggering fleeing world, affianced to the jinglebells of the infernal gamut, on the other hand: new beings....”

If I am against the condition of the world it is not because I am a moralist—it is because I want to laugh more. I don’t say that God is one grand laugh: I say that you’ve got to laugh hard before you can get anywhere near God. My whole aim in life is to get near to God, that is, to get nearer to myself. That’s why it doesn’t matter to me what road I take. But music is very important. Music is a tonic for the pineal gland. Music isn’t Bach or Beethoven; music is the can opener of the soul. It makes you terribly quiet inside, makes you aware that there’s a roof to your being.

Nothing was worse, I learned as a child, than to do a good deed without reason.

You live in the fruits of your action and your action is the harvest of your thought.

remembrance is there in the blood and the blood is like an ocean in which everything is washed away but that which is new and more substantial even than life: reality.