To Sing Doesn’t Cost You a Penny

It must have been a Thursday night when I met her for the first time — at a dance hall.

– Henry Miller, Sexus, 1962

Henry Miller is one of the heroes of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. In his books Miller’s hero was himself, or at least a fictional persona who narrates the stories and who calls himself Henry Miller. The first line of Sexus begins Miller’s seven-year obsession with “her.” Here’s a taste:

I will go directly to her home, ring the bell, and walk in. Here I am, take me — or stab me to death. Stab the head, stab the brain, stab the lungs, the kidneys, the viscera, the eyes, the ears. If only one organ be left alive you are doomed — doomed to be mine, forever, in this world and the next and all the worlds to come. I’m a desperado of love, a scalper, a slayer. I’m insatiable. I eat hair, dirty wax, dry blood clots, anything and everything you call yours.

I believe in God the Father, in Jesus Christ his only begotten Son, in the blessed Virgin Mary, the Holy Ghost, in Adam Cadmium, in chrome nickel, the oxides and the mercurochromes, in waterfowls and water cress, in epileptoid seizures, in bubonic plagues, in devachan, in planetary conjunctions, in chicken tracks and stick-throwing, in revolutions, in stock crashes, in wars, earthquakes, cyclones, in Kali Yoga and in hula-hula. I believe. I believe. I believe because not to believe is to become as lead, to lie prone and rigid, forever inert, to waste away. . . .

I said to myself over and over that if a man, a sincere and desperate man like myself, loves a woman with all his heart, if he is ready to cut off his ears and mail them to her, if he will take his heart’s blood and pump it out on paper, saturate her with his need and longing, besiege her everlastingly, she cannot possibly refuse him. The homeliest man, the weakest man, the most undeserving man must triumph if he is willing to surrender his last drop of blood. No woman can hold out against the gift of absolute love.

I never worried about the genius: genius takes care of the genius in a man… All geniuses are leeches, so to speak. They feed from the same source — the blood of life. The most important thing for the genius is to make himself useless, to be absorbed in the common stream, to become a fish again and not a freak of nature. The only benefit, I reflected, which the act of writing could offer me was to remove the differences that separated me from my fellow man. I definitely did not want to become the artist, in the sense of becoming something strange, something apart and out of the current of life… No man ever puts down what he intended to say: the original creation, which is taking place all the time, whether one writes or doesn’t write, belongs to the primal flux: it has no dimensions, no form, no time element. In this preliminary state, which is creation and not birth, what disappears suffers no destruction; something which was already there, something imperishable, like memory, or matter, or God, is summoned and in it one flings himself like a twig into a torrent. Words, sentences, ideas, no matter how subtle or ingenious, the maddest flights of poetry, the most profound dreams, the most hallucinating visions, are but crude hieroglyphs chiseled in pain and sorrow to commemorate an event, which is untransmissible. In an intelligently ordered world there would be no need to make the unreasonable attempt of putting such miraculous happenings down. Indeed, it would make no sense, for if men only stopped to realize it, who would be content with the counterfeit when the real is at everyone’s beck and call?

I suppose it does sound funny to hear someone say, ‘I love it, it’s wonderful, it’s good, it’s great,’ meaning everything. Of course I don’t feel that way every day — but I’d like to. And when I do I’m normal, when I’m myself. Everybody does, if given a chance. It’s the natural state of the heart. The trouble is, we’re terrorized most of the time. I say ‘we’re terrorized,’ but I mean we terrorize ourselves.

If we could still believe in a god, we’d make him a god of vengeance. We’d surrender to him with a full heart the task of cleaning things up. It’s too late for us to pretend to clean up the mess. We’re in it up to the eyes. We don’t want a new world . . . we want an end to the mess we’ve made. At sixteen you can believe in a new world . . . you can believe anything, in fact . . . but at twenty you’re doomed, and you know it. At twenty you’re well in harness, and the most you can hope for is to get off with arms and legs intact. It isn’t a question of fading hope . . . Hope is a baneful sign; it means impotence. Courage is no use either; everybody can muster courage — for the wrong thing. I don’t know what to say — unless I use a word like vision. And by that I don’t mean a projected picture of the future, of some imagined ideal made real. I mean something more flexible, more constant . . . something like a third eye. We had it once. There was a sort of clairvoyance which was natural and common to all men. Then came the mind, and that eye which permitted us to see whole and round and beyond was absorbed by the brain, and we became conscious of the world, and of one another, in a new way. Our pretty little egos came into bloom: we became self-conscious, and with that came conceit, arrogance, blindness, a blindness such as was never known before, not even by the blind.

Lie down, then, on the soft couch which the analyst provides, and try to think up something different. The analyst has endless time and patience; every minute you detain him means more money in his pocket. He is like God, in a sense — the God of your own creation. Whether you whine, howl, beg, weep, implore, cajole, pray or curse — he listens. He is just a big ear minus a sympathetic nervous system. He is impervious to everything but truth. If you think it pays to fool him then fool him. Who will be the loser? If you think he can help you, and not yourself, then stick to him until you rot. He has nothing to lose. But if you realize that he is not a god but a human being like yourself, with worries, defects, ambitions, frailties, that he is not the repository of an all-encompassing wisdom but a wanderer along the path, perhaps you will cease pouring it out like a sewer, however melodious it may sound to your ears, and rise up on your own two legs and sing with your own God-given voice. To confess, to whine, to complain, to commiserate, always demands a toll. To sing doesn’t cost you a penny. Not only does it cost nothing — you actually enrich others. Sing the praises of the Lord, it is enjoined. Aye, sing out! Sing out, O Master-builder! Sing out, glad warrior! But, you quibble, how can I sing when the world is crumbling, when all about me is bathed in blood and tears? Do you realize that the martyrs sang when they were being burned at the stake? They saw nothing crumbling, they heard no shrieks of pain. They sang because they were full of faith. Who can demolish faith? Who can wipe out joy? Men have tried, in every age. But they have not succeeded. Joy and faith are inherent in the universe. In growth there is pain and struggle; in accomplishment there is joy and exuberance; in fulfillment there is peace and serenity. Between the planes and spheres of existence, terrestrial and superterrestrial, there are ladders and lattices. The one who mounts sings. He is made drunk and exalted by unfolding vistas. He ascends sure-footedly, thinking not of what lies below, should he slip and lose his grasp, but of what lies ahead. Everything lies ahead. The way is endless, and the farther one reaches the more the road opens up. The bogs and quagmires, the marshes and sinkholes, the pits and snares, are all in the mind. They lurk in waiting, ready to swallow one up he moment one ceases to advance. The phantasmal world is the world which has not been fully conquered over. It is the world of the past, never of the future. To move forward clinging to the past is like dragging a ball and chain. The prisoner is not the one who has committed a crime, but the one who clings to his crime and lives it over and over. We are all guilty of crime, the greatest crime of not living life to the full. But we are all potentially free. We can stop thinking what we have failed to do and do whatever lies within our power. What these powers that are in us may be no one has truly dared to imagine. That they are infinite we will realize the day we admit to ourselves that imagination is everything. Imagination is the voice of daring. If there is anything God-like about God it is that. He dared to imagine everything.