Ok, I’ve come to a little standstill with Tropic of Cancer. It’s great, but so much condensed meanness! It’s perhaps the meanest book I ever read. And since I have such a mind that my reality becomes transformed by any type of media I put into it, I found myself feeling a little mean today. I mean, today was actually pretty marvelous. But I was suddenly very voyeuristic and egoic. I followed someone randomly, until it led me down a very pretty bike path and then I wandered off on my own. I just followed him so that I would end up on a different path than my average one, but still it felt strange. I got to the field by the water downtown and I wrote about some of the people I saw. While sitting in the grass on a tapestry, I felt so great and relaxed and in the lap of luxury, that it was humorous to me to see this man thirty feet away, wearing just shorts and sunglasses and talking angrily on the phone. He was all business. Smoking a cigarette, rapidly tapping his pen against his knee, trying to manage something that in the moment seemed very futile to me, tracking a package, and I thought, the package is gone into the world. There’s nothing you can do… just enjoy the sun. (And then I imagined a Russian women whispering “Futile, futile, futile”) Of course, this patting over is the same kind of thinking that keeps hippies ignoring anything but their own hedonism (‘hey man, come on, it’s a nice day, chill out’). Around that same time, my nose very close to the grass, I found a tiny spider navigating the blades of grass with such finesse he was very much like a jungle ape. I was so entirely amused by everything. I laughed at cute dogs. I watched people flirt with each other. Butterflies and dragonflies were flying around. The meanness only came back when I saw a party of three miserable looking women and a scruffy little white dog. The dog was barking and the women were all incredibly displeased, fuming even, telling the dog to shut up and pulling at the collar. I thought in that moment it was the saddest display I’d ever seen. I won’t even go into detail about their physical appearances, I couldn’t bring myself to even write about it in my notebook. (That’s where I would become Henry Miler.) In hippie dialect - “totally bad vibes”.
I have been so amused today, just by thinking. I woke up thinking about amusing things. I have been musing. It is my favorite thing to do alone.
and there’s a roof to sit on out my window.
Life is great.
I started reading Tropic of Cancer today and I am really enjoying it. The narrative style is so packed and rich. For some reason, within the first few chapters it struck me as a book I would try to get high schoolers to read, if I was a teacher. It seems difficult enough to challenge them, yet infused with enough profanity and humor to win them over.
It’s my first time reading Henry Miller… Good literature is honestly my raison d’être. The fact that it’s out there for me to find, and that I do keep finding it.
Untitled by Herman Hesse (1917)
from this article at Melville House (‘Too good for words: When great authors pick up the brush’)
J-PB
“Everything around me bothered and distracted me; everything obsessed me. Some flies and gnats were sitting on my paper and this disturbed me; I breathed on them to make them go, then blew harder and harder, but it did no good. The tiny beasts lowered their behinds, made themselves heavy, and struggled against the wind until their thin legs were bent. They were absolutely not going to leave the place. They would always find something to get hold of, bracing their heels against a comma or an unevenness in the paper, and they intended to stay exactly where they were until they themselves decided it was the right time to go.”
A cortege of men in tailcoats salient against the
green of a resplendent forest. They are bearing a
black wooden coffin and within it I, the invisible
bride. Perhaps there was an aimless arrow, attracted
by imprecision and scarcity. (I often walked in my
floe country, the wide Nordic night.) From the eye of
the wind, its insomniac towers, I see someone
acquainted with my stony dreams: a stubborn and
decrepit lover. His sadness is an angular sky, a
murmur or hymn that says I do not know, don’t care
to know (but that is a lie). His memory does not exist
or exists like a river that flows forward and back; it
bewilders him. Or it is a game, like the one played by the
little girl I will become again, in this or another
forest, untying the ribbons of the golden rose that
usurps the sun.
This book made me go crazy! I’m still digesting it. It feels the same way I felt when I read Dostoevsky for the first time several years ago.
We drew planks near. Pooh, quicklime, dry skin,
it all goes behind nails. You pump the balloon.
The basket, markers, the helmet made of leather
and goggles. Neat. Will you jump from the balloon
to the trampoline made only for body weight?
Gravitation isn’t coupons you can tear off,
all of them at once. You’d kill yourself, tearing
them off all at once. Lungs widen. The space
changes, you stand up and sing, sing and sing,
the space becomes blue, your hair stands up,
you undress and dance, it sprinkles, brains literally
spray and you go into the belly of a spider,
settle there, pick up a broom in the first moment,
clean a bit in this huge sphere, then see the walls
blot what is under the broom, and again
you stand up and sing, you swing in a sort of
live sand. The walls start to drip. You don’t hit
the keys anymore. The scribe looks over his shoulder
and asks: shouldn’t we stop for today, as it seems
the spider’s belly will burst? And where shall we
go then? On the paper? With all this birth water?
