“Everything is endured–disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui–in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable. And all the while a meter is running inside and there is no hand that can reach in there and shut it off. All the while some one is eating the bread of life and drinking the wine, some dirty fat cockroach of a priest who hides away in the cellar guzzling it, while up above in the light of the street a phantom host touches the lips and the blood is pale as water. And out of the endless torment and misery no miracle comes forth, no microscopic vestige even of relief. Only ideas, pale, attenuated ideas which have to be fattened by slaughter; ideas which come forth like bile, like the guts of a pig when the carcass is ripped open. And so I think what a miracle it would be if this miracle which man attends eternally should turn out to be nothing more than these two enormous turds which the faithful disciple dropped in the bidet. What if at the last moment, when the banquet table is set and the cymbals clash, there should appear suddenly, and wholly without warning, a silver platter on which even the blind could see that there is nothing more, and nothing less, than two enormous lumps of shit. That, I believe, would be more miraculous than anything man has looked forward to.”
Reading Tropic of Cancer
Have you read it or any other Miller books? Your thoughts?
Miller, Anias Nin, the air-conditioned something, ah yes, the air conditiioned Night Mare, right?
did you know that in his last years, just before he passed on to the Great Turd Beyond, as he would have described it, he had a wonderful love with an Asian woman, from Japan I think, who helped him get thru that last period of … life 101.
Great man, great writer, great intellect, great creative power. I never met him but I did meet Anais Nin once and she told he was a god. I believe her, even though I am an atheist.
I’ve read Sexus and The Colossus of Maroussi…real mind bending stuff…
I stood at the corner of 42nd Street and Broadway my first and only time in the city so great, they hadda…ahhh fugedabutit…
I knew I had seen this scene before…The Neil Simon Theatre on the left and a Dancetarium on the right…I’ve seen many a movie and I love a New York story best-a-all…I stood there for 30 minutes…what movie was it???
I stood pondering…reflecting…like those famous lights glowing in the cancrous water roiling about in those Manhattenite potholes…and it dawned on me…I was remembering a Miller-image…burned into the video-memory of my mind with mere words…the Dancetarium was where he first meets the subject of his passion…
It’s been a long time and reading Miller is like smoking a fattee…it buzzes ya right up…
One of the best prose I know of.
He certainly was a natural with words.
I’m sure I didn’t get beyond the prose, though. I tend to believe he was slightly deranged. At
times, he goes into this logorrhea of words like an insane preacher.
I see his books as halfway between prose and poetry.
Now we are talking! Just noticed the film and book section today (a little slow). Damn I love Henry Miller. Within a few pages you could have the most mind-blowing passages and then get into some stuff that fell flat on its face. But the stuff that works is just brilliant. He took risks in his writing and it shows with glorious highs and mundane lows. I like all the raunchy sex stuff too, but I really liked “Nexus” where there isn’t too much sex but lots about his ideas on writing and his struggles in becoming one.
Still, at least he didn’t use it as a drinking fountain.