THE SHIRT

A Short Story

By Tom Reddock

Only moments before he died my father looked at me and said,

“I like your shirt.”

I never knew what he meant by that.

The End

Thich Nhat Hanh and Henry Miller

I’ve been reading both Thich Nhat Hanh and Henry Miller at the same time. They speak the same language in different tongues. They sing of life with exuberance, skill, and clarity. The force of their honesty cannot be ignored. They oppose fear and all of its extensions: anger, greed, authoritarianism, power lust, denial, dependency, ambition, materialism, boredom, inadequacy, failure, self incrimination, disrespect, selfishness, hopelessness, in short, all the common qualities of politicians, lawyers, cops, military generals, university officials, bureaucrats, and most school teachers, priests, and business leaders as well. They opt for life in the moment with the fire of love in their eyes and peace in their hearts. They refuse to kill for any reason, especially patriotism. They open their hearts to everyone without exception, reaching across the great divide of ignorance to the forces of fear on both sides while refusing to take sides. They speak with everyone in mind, including the Hitler’s and Bush’s of our life and times, because they recognize that we are all here together in this wonderful moment, and they sing with forgiveness and grace in their hearts. Their goal is peace on earth in this singular, beautiful moment.

HERE COMES THE SUN

Resurrection is evolution. Change is constant. Death is birth, etcetera. If we don’t live it is because we are dead, and then not dead.

Life: Music. Rhythm. Harmony. Song. Voice. Sound. Roar. Cough. Snore. Poem.

Bersone sent this note and first draft of a poem, EASTER 2009. The notes between us that followed is the correspondence below. We’ll print only the first version of the poem here, and then the last at the end. This is how things grow, and how energy engenders energy, the universal law.

Evolution. Resurrection. Happy Easter.


Email to the Buffalo
Sunday 04/12/2009 11:07 AM Bersone:

howdy doody bro -- messing around with an old Ting: shooting it off
feeling it's a hodge-podge but part of the mix. Happy Easter, Mon.

Easter, 2009

I wonder if it’s some kind of sin
to take refuge in pleasure
at this time

birdseed that sparkles
like crushed topaz
on the carport roof

is it some kind of sin
to evaluate the rusty seavan
in the Laundromat parking lot
and be so gratefully repulsed by the bloating
garbage bags tossed on top of it
(swelling so silently in the sun)
to feel that this ugliness
confirms my presence

and allows me
to enjoy the couple that lives
in their car, the hood up, the trunk open and she
seated on a stool
as he combs her hair in the sun
dipping his comb into a bucket of water
occasionally, sparklets sprinkled
for a second as he flicks excessive
moisture into the air

when in the middle of everything
everything they do is done
carefully, for example, how he shaves
in the sideview mirror, and folds
his little towel so precisely

what has happened to time
during this mutual duration
are actions now some kind of diminution
of worry or simply a suspension
of consequences or is it really

a sin to wait it out like this
marveling at my improbable birch tree
its thin limbs pulled down by plump
sparrows that watch
me bring my coffee cup

to my lips. When will he throw out
more seeds, they think. When
will he get on his job! I am

in this world, that’s for sure --
just ask the birds. Perhaps my pleasure
is some kind of sin

redeemed only by my gratitude
for the El Tio Juan taco trailer
fate has put
next to the Laundromat, the Laundromat
with about eighteen
aluminum vents on the roof, quite silvery,
actually, beneath the cumulus

clouds bulging higher, there edges
so sharply defined by shadow
they’re almost solid . . . dear dear Life

accept my plea
I don’t deserve such beauty
that it expand before me so that all I do
is be stunned by wonder
when there is so much to do
to help our poor world

yet this poor rich world
so comically orientated by horror
with its little store, painted like a Mexican flag
and run by Arabs who seem to hate me
our poor rich world

with its headlines
of international events --
Christ! This neighborhood is an international event!

And the pleasure it affords
with its mariachi music out the front door
and rap out the back
and me at the helm on my porch
totally in charge of nothing
but birdseed, coffee, and reading
Yeats! For Christ’s sake! Look at the sparrows!

some focused on seeds
some on the cat licking its paws
as it reclines in the ivy
that has climbed with spring green leaves
up onto the corrugated greet fiberglass carport roof
left over from the fifties

everything proceeds from where it is
and everything is transforming itself
like a million Christs emerging from the underworld
or rummaging around
in the underworld off my back porch

buoyed by pleasureful sin
the smell of bacon! The refuge
of what is at hand: my neighbors
seem to be Mayans, and next to them
Vietnamese, and across the street
an old white couple continuously prepare
their car for a trip to the doctor

And Flo, with her two boys
and the neglected dog, and the birds
who have discovered seeds sparkling
like brown sugar on a fiberglass roof
while around the corner at the Hell’s Angels’
headquarters the throats of motorcycles are snapped
into fire purely for pleasure

O world you don’t
forgive us our pleasure, you give
more and more pleasure and beauty on top
of the horror and ugliness
in the mix of torrents and bullets and screams the flight
of lights in our minds will continue to ignite

our hearts until we get off the dime
Yes, I ask, who’s going to pick up
that old entertainment center even the Mayans
threw out. Inertia
will carry it downstream along with everything else.
What we have is the ride

and I’m at the helm.


Sunday 04/12/2009 3:34 PM Buffalo:

There is much fruit in this basket, my Bro - along with the Easter eggs and candy rabbits. The deepest sin of pleasure is to be blinded to life, a crime you have yet to commit. The greatest horror of the roadside bomb it to ignore the sparrow shitting without a second thought. And that is another crime you will not burn in Hades for - nor will those who read your poems with empty mind and open heart. Today is devoted to resurrection, while every day is a new resurrection. As for me, I'll take the erection over the resurrection any day. When I die I want to stay put. I am no Sisyphus. Once up the hill is enough, then I'm heading for the next hill, then the next. Today is Easter, tomorrow is not. What's most important is this Spring sun on my back, and the little birds fucking like rabbits. They sing so sweetly when they're horny, just as we did Spring after Spring after Spring.

So let's leave this with Leon Russell: Don't get hung up over Easter.

Good poem. Keep chewing, and don't forget to breathe.

Buff


Sunday 04/12/2009 5:55 PM Bersone:

I changed shit according to your reaction, dropping most of the guilt
stuff, which wasn't in the original but came in after I was reading
T.S. Eliot's more conservatively religious work. Acknowledged as a
Great Poet, I thought I'd read him a little bit. He was great but at
the end of the cycle, Lawrence more at the beginning. Anyhow, I stuck
more to the images, I haven't reread this over too carefully and
figure there may be some discontinuity here and there, lack of
bridges or transitions but it tries to catch us doodling on the brink
as we are wont to do as our canoe heads into the rapids.

Larry's coming over for some dynamite thick lamb chops Ruby picked up
at Taylor's, a great old neighborhood Italian deli in Sacramento.
Today was warm, and we working in the garden, turning over some dirt
and we saved a big robin that lost its tail last night; we threw a
towel over it and put it in a box and called some rescue wild animal
place Ruby found in the phone book. The lady said the feathers will
grow back quickly if they're pulled out not cut. Last night we heard
Maya in a bit of a fight and we presume chased off another cat;
perhaps this cat was what got the bird and maybe Maya disturbed the
assault because I don't think the bird could have escaped. It's
wings weren't broken, nor its legs, but it totally lost its tail and
showed some skin on its back making it unable to fly. It could hop
pretty well, and work the wings, but they need the tail I guess.

Talk to you soon.


Sunday 02/12/2009 6:26 PM Buffalo:

Some great images - a thread through it all - humor and horror stacked like a BLT. I love your work.

Inspired by Steve's stories I reformed the one attached. I think you've seen this. Every day is a marvel. Good lord, what a trip this all is!!!

The Robin is an interesting story. Demise is waiting behind every moment. The birds take it in stride, and they never whine. I hope it survives. We all need a little tail to make us fly.

Here's a toast to you all for your Easter lamb: To you, my friends, on this day of resurrection. You are my inspiration!

With love...

Buff


Monday 04/13/2009 9:05 AM Bersone:

Hi Buff,
Just finished reading through the story, Assassination, which is wonderfully fluid; the first line grabs you right away and puts the mind on a track of memory and line of thought that seems to run concurrently with the story. I breezed through the gambling details a little hurriedly, I noticed, and found myself at the end meditating a bit on the close relationship between sex and death. I remember Erika telling me, who was in her mother's womb during the bombing of Berlin during World War II, that her mother told her stories of mothers, feeling that death was imminent, and having adolescent sons whom they felt were going to die also and, realizing they would die without having known a woman sexually, had sex with them as Berlin was being bombed into rubble. And in New York, during the brown-outs, sex must have gone on at an unprecedented rate because there was a bumper crop of babies nine months later. As for your story, it is continuing easily; I'm not sure how you changed it, inspired as you say by Steve's stories. That the narrative has solid ground under it may be part of it. The story within the story, the fate of the artist within the young, diffident stumble-bum carrying the vision, holds the suspense for me, how he becomes a man, essentially, for the promise is that the man he becomes will define manhood differently than the inherited convention. Looking forward to more. This thing is coming out.

thanks for your reaction to what I sent you. I'll attach a version with a few corrections. Personally, I don't know what to think of it; some of the metrics I liked but I wondered was it a bit like crocheting a doily. I did feel pretty good about yesterday, though, and Larry came over for a good dinner.


Monday 04/13/2009 1:35 PM Buffalo:

Yo Mon –
Thanks for your comments on ASSASSINATION. I am happy that it took you somewhere. Yes, real sex is like dying, dying into profound peace along with your mate of the moment. Greed is also a form of death, but in the opposite direction, thus the whole Reno bit. The winning streak described actually happened to me much like it is described, minus the absurd fantasy bit, which, of course, is rather Milleresque.

The influence that Steve had on the story was that I suddenly saw it as a complete entity in itself (this, after reading several of his stories), rather than as just a part of the larger story – the novel. I’ve done the same thing with the first chapter of the book about Maxwell dancing in his underwear in the desert, the afternoon in the sand storm at the house of Charles and Jasmine, the coyote near the lake, and sleeping under the stars. (DESERT STORM) I intend to do the same with SUICIDE BY PRAYER. I should be able to make up a collection of these things and have them printed up in a volume through the self publishing route. This is what I am encouraging Steve to do, though he is rather cool to self publishing, and I honor his understanding of the profession about which I know nothing. I hope we can produce a collection of your work – maybe under a heading like SWIMMING JOURNAL, just as an example.

I got up at 4:30 and worked at the office until noon, which I will have to do tomorrow, as well. All this pisses me off because it is just a distraction from the real work; a pint of blood for the vampires of commerce. When will I finally call an end to all this shit!

I am enjoying reading and re-reading the Easter poem. It is a journey through the universe, down main street, into the backyard, to nowhere. Quite an accomplishment, that. One of my favorite lines:

me at the helm on my porch
totally in charge of nothing
but birdseed

That touches something true in all of us, if we have enough guts to admit it. How can all these people see anything in it’s true form, who are so full of self-importance? Even Obama is a funny joke; and the pirates; and the Governors, and doctors, hiding behind something called Science. What a joke they are, indeed.

Listen, I hear that poet singing – or is that a dove in heat? Hardly matters. The truth is always known no matter who tells it, or what. Just listen; that’s the job.

Thank you!

Buff

(Note: If you have an interest in the two stories mentioned above, ASSASSINATION and DESERT STORM, send me an email and I’ll send them along. Buff)


Monday 04/13/2009 3:1/ PM Bersone:

I learned something once. There's a long tragic poem, written oh I don't know -- in the ten hundreds, Tristan and Isolde, and I was reading fairy tales once, maybe in Grimm's, and came across a fragment of it. The whole story had been lost to the teller of the fragment, and he told his story like a short story, thinking no doubt that that was all there was to it. When I compared it to the original, longer work, where the whole plot was laid out, the difference was that the teller of the short story embellished his fragment with more details, which gave it a richness of texture, you might say, as a compensation for the powerful narrative drive of the original where the full tragic meaning came clear in the plot and trimmed off non-essential details. The illusion in the fragment was that there was more time, more time could be taken with details. I remember one of Picasso's teachers saying of him, when he was a student, that his work was as good as the others but the difference was that he didn't waste time in surface detail, presumably shading and clothing detail and so forth. He was after the visual rhythm in the figure, inside and out, so with a deft stroke or two he caught the movement of the bones which caught the gesture of the model. Sometimes it looked abstract, because he left everything else out. He wanted both the inner and the outer, and wasn't prejudiced only toward outer appearance. Maybe this is analogous to short story vs novel. I tell you, you've always had a powerful narrative drive but, I think, writing is like using muscles, you develop more stamina the more you write, and can hold forth the illusion and flow of language longer. Writers like Dickens, for example, or Steinbeck, are powerhouses like this. But your drive is natural, and would grow exponentially to use, I imagine. Of course, we must both caution ourselves in imagining so much superstructure that the whole thing collapses before we get pen to paper. It's a dance with oneself, I suppose, and we know the Fool. But sometimes the illusion of the Fool is necessary to get things done; the pragmatic man is full of limitations.

I can't tell you how much your appreciation of my little poem means to me at this point. Yesterday was a pretty good day and the poem seemed to come off ok by sort of working on it out of the corner of my eye. Sometimes the secret may lay in not taking it too seriously. By the way, the sandstorm description, once you mentioned it, came back in a vivid flash, with him looking out the window, at the streetlight swaying in the desert wind: quite a picture of the wasteland.


Monday 04/13/2009 5:29 PM Buffalo:

What a great lesson you share with me! You really nailed it! You are an excellent teacher, in part, because you refuse to teach – you participate. You know, this is exactly how Bob teaches his drum classes and precisely why he is so popular. I can see you teaching a string of classes in creative writing, much like Bob does. As far as making a living goes, wouldn’t that be more rewarding for you than what you are doing in the City? Anyway, thank you! I love this: “We must both caution ourselves in imagining so much superstructure that the whole thing collapses before we get pen to paper. It's a dance with oneself, I suppose, and we know the Fool. But sometimes the illusion of the Fool is necessary to get things done; the pragmatic man is full of limitations.” Now that I think of it, Bob has said almost the same thing to me about the Fool. We should ask him about it the next time the three of us are together. I just picked up this from the internet: “The Fool is the spirit in search of experience. He represents the mystical cleverness bereft of reason within us, the childlike ability to tune into the inner workings of the world.” How apt, exactly what you meant by the Fool. But the bigger lesson is your cautioning about imagining too much superstructure. Even when I was playing with Tinker Toys I tended to make things that were much too grand to stand alone. And yes, I must go to the writing gym every day for a workout, build my writing stamina which will bring more patience, and quit wasting my precious time trying to fulfill the dreams of others, an impossible task. How, how, how can I break away from these old and defeating habits?

Thanks, amigo! You are indeed an inspiration!!!

Buff


Tuesday 04/15/2009 6:18 AM Bersone:

thanks for your appreciation. What you said about going nowhere makes
me want to continue this spirit journey so I changed the ending of
this section by going into the falls. I'm thinking of Niagra Falls,
and I figure to enter it through its sound, sort of like an entrance
into hell, a wondrous hell perhaps, at first through the harsh sounds
of the several blocks of arcades you must ply before you come to the
calm power of the falls themselves which, however much they have been
taken over by corporations that specialize in vacation attractions
such as they are, standardizing them in gross commercial terms, the
falls still stand as a major power point. I've written a little of
another section, but I won't send it on now because I'm not too sure
of it and maybe I won't get it done (superstructure problem) but will
send what I have and maybe post it. check it out when you have time
and see what you think. Hope you're feeling ok, with the meds and
all. I know about the teaching but there's not much I can do right
now. What we're doing is what we're doing and it's more than what
I'm not doing.

EASTER, 2009

Birdseed sparkles: crushed
topaz on the carport
roof & the rusting
seavan with black garbage bags swelling
so silently on top
under the sun

in the parkinglot
behind the Laundromat
the Laundromat with about
18 aluminum vents
on the roof quite
silvery, actually,
beneath the cumulus

clouds bulging higher
edged so sharply by gray
They seemed carved

I don’t think I’ll ever get over them
when I notice

the couple that lives in their car,
hood up, trunk open and she
seated on a stool
as he combs her hair in the sun

dipping his comb into a bucket of water
occasionally, silently
snapping a whip of waterdrops
off the end of it before leisurely
resuming combing

so that in the middle of everything
everything they do is done
carefully, for example, how he shaves
in the sideview mirror, and folds
his little towel so precisely

forget time, now, that’s gone
you don’t think Christ in the underworld
underwent his last temptation
in three days do you…I mean
it was an eternity at least

as long as this mix of marvels:
my improbable birch tree
it’s thin limbs pulled down by plump
sparrows that watch
me bring my coffee cup

to my lips. When’ll he throw out
more seeds. When O when
will he get on his job! I am

in this world, that’s for sure --
just ask the birds. Yes I am grateful

for the El Tio Juan taco trailer
fate has put
next to the Laundromat
where everyone gathers

to watch soccer and washing machines’
round windows wet
clothes make faces in
children make faces back at

and a mix of languages annealed
by bickering into an amalgamated lingo
we’ve yet to parse: whoozit!

May we deserve such beauty
so ugly and real all we can do
is be stunned by wonder we
wonder what we can do to make doing
nothing holier than something
for nothing’s sake
to help our poor world

this rich Persian rag of a world
so comical with its horror
with its little store, painted like the Mexican flag
run by Arabs who hand me change
with a disdain so dismissive
its infuriatingly murderous

our poor rich world
with its headlines
of international events --
Christ! This neighborhood is an international event!

Thank you for the pleasure it affords!
Mariachi music out the front door
rap out the back
me at the helm on my porch
totally in charge of nothing
but birdseed, coffee, and reading
Yeats! For Christ’s sake! Look at the sparrows!

some focused on seeds
some focused on the cat licking its paws
as it reclines in the ivy
that has climbed with spring-green leaves
shining up onto the carport roof
left over from the fifties:

everything proceeds from where it is
everything is transforming itself
like a million christs emerging from the underworld
or rummaging around
in the underworld off my back porch

buoyed by our sin of pleasure in horror.
The smell of bacon! The refuge
of what is at hand: my neighbors
seem to be Mayans, and next to them
Vietnamese, and across the street
an old white couple continuously prepare their car
for a trip to another world

and Flo, with her two boys
and the neglected dog, and the birds
who have discovered seeds sparking
like brown sugar on a fiberglass roof
while around the corner at the Hells’s Angels’
headquarters the throats of motorcycles are snapped
into fire purely
for pleasure

O world you never deny us
our pleasure you give more and more beauty on top
of ugliness so real it turns
into torrents heaving up telephone poles, sirens spiraling and the flight
of light through our minds to continue to ignite

our hearts until we get off the dime.
Yes, I ask, Who’s going to pick up
that old entertainment center even the Mayans threw out.
Inertia
will carry it downstream along with everything else.
What we have is the ride
and the precious ride we carry within

and I am
at the helm as I nose my canoe
into the rapids and head for the falls.


Wednesday 04/15/2009 6:53 AM Buffalo:

I like your idea and will watch with empty mind.

The rhythm of the falls,
relentless, the roar
of the water dragon, and past
his blazing eyes
the calm of mist, holding
in mid air
the chirp of the Dipper.
Within this din is heard the drip
of mist
the uncoiling fern
the voices
of those long gone.


See what you do to me? Another moment has passed.

Home today. Doing the real work on a cool and cloudy day, but look! Here comes the sun!

Ahhh



Here comes the sun, here comes the sun,
and I say it's all right

Little darling, it's been a long cold lonely winter
Little darling, it feels like years since it's been here
Here comes the sun, here comes the sun
and I say it's all right

Little darling, the smiles returning to the faces
Little darling, it seems like years since it's been here
Here comes the sun, here comes the sun
and I say it's all right

Sun, sun, sun, here it comes...
Sun, sun, sun, here it comes...
Sun, sun, sun, here it comes...
Sun, sun, sun, here it comes...
Sun, sun, sun, here it comes...

Little darling, I feel that ice is slowly melting
Little darling, it seems like years since it's been clear
Here comes the sun, here comes the sun,
and I say it's all right
It's all right

Here’s a good video of this BEATLES song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUS49XSN6Zs

YOU ARE NOT DEPRESSED. YOU ARE DISTRACTED.

I ran across this posting today on a blog that I have been following for a few months. Check it out. It will make you feel good. I promise!

http://gravitando.wordpress.com/2009/03/24/you-are-not-depressed-you-are-distracted/

The blog is written by a young jewelry designer who lives in Costa Rica. I found her when I did a Google search for the writer Anais Nin and followed this link:

http://gravitando.wordpress.com/2008/03/10/winter-1931-1932-from-the-diary-of-anais-nin/

To see the whole blog, click on the blog title, AL GRAVITAR RODANDO, at the top of her page.

(To return to this page, press the BACK arrow.)

A RIDE ON THE OVARIAN TROLLEY

Commentary and Excerpts from “The Tropic of Capricorn”, by Henry Miller

Labor Day

My eyes snapped open like those of a marionette – wooden body; glass eyes. The air came cool through the open window behind my head, ocean scented. It was 2:26 AM by the atomic clock on the desk. Only the steam-like hiss of a distant car gave texture to the silent night. But then I heard what I knew had awakened me: a small near imperceptible “pah”, and then a silence of a few seconds, “pah, pah”, like the touching of the tongue to the roof of the mouth. It was the drip of the faucet on the deck near my window, “pah”, dripping onto a random board below. I would never sleep until I had tightened the faucet to stop the drip. “Pah”. I decided to read for a while before attempting sleep once again and reached through the darkness for the book shelf until I touched the volumes , removing one at random. What I would be reading would be left to providence. Having tightened the faucet, I sat in the living room under the lamp and smiled at the volume providence had provided: Henry Miller’s, “Tropic of Capricorn”.

I would say that this was Henry’s best book. Perhaps not his best writing, that would most likely be "The Colossus of Maroussi", his favorite book, or perhaps "The Tropic of Cancer", where he first heard the sound of his own voice. But "Capricorn" is for me the best because it sings to me like no other writing ever has, and it has endured the test of over fifty years as one of my constant companions. Often, when feeling a longing for his council, I will open the book randomly and begin to read. His voice is open and assessable and amazingly clear. His words are light and easy, so that one can even hear the Brooklyn accent which brings a smile, and yet rooted deep below the surface into the miasma of the inevitable truth, that truth which cannot be ignored except by the most calloused and lost soul. Each time I read from this book it is as if for the first time. I follow his voice and listen, receiving the song, occasionally singing along.

I plug on…It’s just as hard to go back as to go forward. I don’t have the feeling of being an American citizen anymore. The part of America I came from, where I had some rights, where I felt free, is so far behind me that it is beginning to get fuzzy in my memory. I feel as though someone has got a gun against my back all the time. Keep moving, is all I seem to hear. If a man talks to me I try not to seem too intelligent. I try to pretend that I am vitally interested in the crops, in the weather, in the elections. If I stand and stop they look at me, whites and blacks – they look at me through and through as though I were juicy and edible. I’ve got to look sort of grateful, too, that nobody has yet taken a fancy to plug me. It’s depressing and exhilarating at the same time. You’re a marked man – and yet nobody pulls the trigger. They let you walk unmolested right into the Gulf of Mexico where you can drown yourself.

Yes sir, I reached the Gulf of Mexico and I walked right into it and drowned myself. I did it gratis. When they fished the corps out they found it was marked F.O.B. Myrtle Avenue, Brooklyn; it was returned C.O.D. When I was asked later why I had killed myself I could only think to say – because I wanted to electrify the cosmos! I meant by that a very simple thing – The Delaware, Lackawanna and Western had been electrified, The Seaboard Air Line had been electrified, but the soul of man was still in the covered wagon stage. I was born in the midst of civilization and I accepted it very naturally – what else was there to do? But the joke was that nobody else was taking it seriously. I was the only man in the community that was civilized. There was no place for me – as yet. And yet the books I read, the music I heard assured me that there were other men in the world like myself. I had to go and drown myself in the Gulf of Mexico in order to have an excuse for continuing this pseudo-civilized existence. I had to delouse myself of my spiritual body, as it were.

When I woke up to the fact that as far as the scheme of things goes I was less than dirt I really became quite happy. I quickly lost all sense of responsibility. And if it weren’t for the fact that my friends got tired of lending me money I might have gone on indefinitely pissing the time away. The world was like a museum to me; I saw nothing to do but to eat into this marvelous chocolate layer cake which the men of the past had dumped into our hands. It annoyed everybody to see the way I enjoyed myself. Their logic was that art was beautiful, oh yes, indeed, but you must work for a living and then you will find out that you are too tired to think about art. But it was when I threatened to add a layer or two on my own account to this marvelous chocolate layer cake that they blew up on me. That was the finishing touch. That meant I was definitely crazy. First I was considered to be a useless member of society; then for a time I was found to be a reckless, happy-go-lucky corps with a tremendous appetite; now I had become crazy. (Listen, you bastard, you find yourself a job…we’re through with you!) In a way it was refreshing, this change of front. I could feel the wind blowing through the corridors. At least “we” were no longer becalmed. It was war, and as a corps I was just fresh enough to have a little fight left in me. War was revivifying. War stirs the blood. It was in the midst of the world war, which I had forgotten about, that this change of heart took place. I got myself married overnight, to demonstrate to all and sundry that I didn’t give a fuck one way or the other. . Getting married was O.K. in their minds. I remember that, on the strength of the announcement, I raised five bucks immediately. My friend MacGregor paid for the license and even paid for the shave and haircut which he insisted I go through in order to get married. They said you couldn’t go without being shaved; I didn’t see any reason why you couldn’t get hitched up without a shave and haircut, but since it didn’t cost me anything I submitted to it. It was interesting to see how everybody was eager to contribute something to our maintenance. All of a sudden, just because I had shown a bit of sense, they came flocking around us – and couldn’t they do this and couldn’t they do that for us? Of course the assumption was that now I would surely be going to work, now I would see that life is a serious business. It never occurred to them that I would let my wife work for me. I was really very decent to her in the beginning. I wasn’t a slave driver. All I asked for was carfare – to hunt for the mythical job – and a little pen money for cigarettes, movies, et cetera. The important things, such as books, music albums, gramophones, porterhouse steaks and such like I found that we could get on credit, now that we were married. The installment plan had been invented expressly for guys like me. The down payment was easy – the rest I left to Providence. One has to live, they were always saying. Now, by God, that’s what I said to myself – One has to live! Live first and pay afterwards. If I saw an overcoat I liked I went in and bought it. I would buy it a little in advance of the season too, to show that I was a serious-minded chap. Shit, I was a married man and soon I would probably be a father – I was entitled to an overcoat at least, no? And when I had the overcoat I thought about stout shoes to go with it – a pair of thick cordovans such as I had wanted all my life but could never afford. And when it grew bitter cold and I was out looking for the job I used to get terribly hungry sometimes – it’s really healthy going out like that day after day prowling around the city in rain and snow and wind and hail – and so now and then I’d drop in to a cozy tavern and order myself a juicy porterhouse steak with onions and french fried potatoes. I took out life insurance and accident insurance too – it’s important, when you’re married, to do things like that, so they told me. Supposing I should drop dead one day – what then? I remember the guy telling me that, in order to clench his argument. I had already told him I would sign up, but he must have forgotten it. I had said, yes, immediately, out of force of habit, but as I say, he had evidently overlooked it – or else it was against the code to sign a man up until you had delivered the full sales talk. Anyway, I was just getting ready to ask him how long it would take before you could make a loan on the policy when he popped the hypothetical question: Supposing you should drop dead one day – what then? I guess he thought I was a little off my nut the way I laughed at that. I laughed until the tears rolled down my face. Finally he said – “I don’t see that I said anything funny.” “Well,” I said, getting serious for a moment, “take a look at me. Now tell me, do you think I’m the sort of fellow who gives a fuck what happens once he is dead?” He was quite taken aback by this, apparently, because the next thing he said was: “I don’t think that’s a very ethical attitude, Mr. Miller. I’m sure you wouldn’t want your wife to…” “Listen,” I said, “supposing I told you I don’t give a fuck what happens to my wife when I die – what then?” And since this seemed to injure his ethical susceptibilities still more I added for good measure – “As far as I’m concerned you don’t have to pay the insurance when I croak – I’m only doing this to make you feel good. I’m trying to help the world along, don’t you see? You’ve got to live, haven’t you? Well, I’m just putting a little food in your mouth, that’s all. If you have anything else to sell, trot it out. I buy anything that sounds good. I’m a buyer not a seller. I like to see people looking happy – that’s why I buy things. Now listen, how much did you say that would come to per week? Fifty-seven cents? Fine. What’s fifty-seven cents? You see that piano – that comes to about thirty-nine cents a week, I think. Look around you…everything you see costs so much a week. You say, if I should die – what then? Do you suppose I’m going to die on all these people? That would be a hell of a joke. No, I’d rather have them come and take the things away – if I can’t pay for them, I mean…”

All of this takes me back to the ‘60s when I was giving the “day job” and marriage route an honest try. As I rode the bus across the Golden Gate into The City each morning I would be reading a passage like this one, and still trying to do the right thing. They say, “The truth hurts.” I say, the truth is inevitable and cannot be ignored. It MUST be taken in. It MUST be consumed, and somehow incorporated into one’s life. But how, in the face of the pressures and expectations? How, if you just cannot ignore for one more moment the insanity of it all? How, when your sharpest instinct tells you to give it all up, throw it all out, cut and run? If one’s life is a sham, if the pursuit of a job, any job, is obviously idiotic, if the dedication of your life to standards and practices that you know in your truest instincts to be a sham, useless in the deepest sense, if you must lie to your own self each and every morning just to get up the gumption to put on that three-piece suit and get out on the corner to catch the bus into The City just in order to perpetuate this repetitive madness, how can one live with himself with a sense of pride? It was a gap that I could not cross. I could, at times, stride the gap, one foot on each side of the divide, but I could never fully accept myself with pride and a sense of accomplishment. Getting a job was always easy. Putting on the smile, showing up to work, going through the motions, climbing the ladder to success, was always easy for me. I could have been any of the characters on the list they gave me in the sixth grade of possible professions to choose from, but I instinctively knew that none of them would make me a true man, alive to the hilt, filled with the joy and wonder of this existence we all share. None of them would make me “successful” in the truest sense of the word. So, where did I fit in? What was the source of my passion? Music? How could I raise a family on the income of a mediocre musician? And besides that, playing music in the “music scene”, being a performer, was never of interest to me. I always looked at music as an art form, a way to express the inner churning and yearning. I never wanted to perform, be an act, go on the road, create a following, become famous. I was an alchemist; I always wanted to make the stuff, conjure it up. JUST FOR THE SAKE OF DOING IT AND NOTHING MORE! Even on that day when I had sat only a few feet from Duke Ellington and his piano that time at the Sacramento State Fair, when he had noticed me watching his rehearsal and had invited me back for the performance, even then at the age of fourteen, sitting so close to what I could tell was genius at work, when I watched the band members play his compositions with such a high level of craft and devotion, even then I knew that this was not me, the smiling, dapper performer. So where did that leave me. My mother always encouraged the music, but with a word of caution that first I had to find a good job. A job. What the fuck was a job? Working all day every day for what? It just never made sense to me.

And always, there was Henry. I would consult him like a prophet. I would read his words and wonder why I couldn’t find the courage to adopt his optimism, his powerful sense of self, even while drifting through the horseshit of daily life in the streets. Even while being confronted by the insanity of the work-a-day world.

I knew very well I’d have to make a break one 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 was more than 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 adaption. 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 wore themselves out tugging and straining and pulling; my strategy was to float with the tide. What people did to me didn’t bother me nearly so much as what they were doing to others or to themselves. I was really so damned well off inside that I had to take on the problems of the world. That’s why I was in a mess all the time. I wasn’t synchronized with my own destiny, so to speak. I was trying to live out the world destiny. If I got home of an evening, for instance, and there was no food in the house, not even for the kid, I would turn around and go looking for the food. But what I noticed about myself, and that was what puzzled me, was that no sooner outside and hustling for the grub than I was back at the Weltanschauung again. I didn’t think of food for us exclusively, I thought of food in general, food in all its stages, everywhere in the world at that hour, and how it was gotten and how it was prepared and what people did if they didn’t have it and how maybe there was a way to fix it so that everyone would have it when they wanted it and no more time wasted on such an idiotically simple problem. I felt sorry for the wife and kid, sure, but I also felt sorry for the Hottentots and the Australian bushmen, not to mention the starving Belgians and the Turks and the Armenians. 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. Fine paving stones under foot and asphalt in the middle of the street and beautifully-hideously-elegant brownstone stoops to walk up, and yet a guy could walk about all day and all night on this expensive material and be looking for a crust of bread. That’s what got me. The incongruousness of it. If one could only dash out with a dinner bell and yell, “Listen, listen, people, I’m a guy what’s hungry. Who wants shoes shined? Who wants the garbage brought out? Who wants the drainpipes cleaned out?” If you could only go out into the street and put it to them clear like that. But no, you don’t dare to open your trap. If you tell a guy in the street that you are hungry you scare the shit out of him, and he runs like hell. That’s something I never understood. I don’t understand it yet. The whole thing is so simple – you just say Yes when someone comes up to you. And if you can’t say Yes you can take him by the arm and ask some other bird to help out. Why you have to don a uniform and kill men you don’t know, just to get that crust of bread, is a mystery to me. That’s what I think about, more than about whose trap it’s going down or how much it costs. Why should I give a fuck about what anything costs? I’m here to live, not to calculate. And that’s 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. If I were running the boat things wouldn’t be so orderly perhaps, but it would be gayer, by Jesus! You wouldn’t have to shit in your pants over trifles. Maybe there wouldn’t be macadamized roads and streamlined cars and loudspeakers and gadgets of a million billion varieties, maybe there wouldn’t even be glass in the windows, maybe you’d have to sleep on the ground, maybe there wouldn’t be French cooking and Italian cooking and Chinese cooking, maybe people would kill each other when their patience was exhausted and maybe nobody would stop them because there wouldn’t be any jails or any cops or judges, and there certainly wouldn’t be any cabinet ministers or legislatures because there wouldn’t be any goddamned laws to obey or disobey, and maybe it would take months or years to trek from place to place, but you wouldn’t bear a number and if you wanted to change your name every week you could do it because it wouldn’t make any difference since you wouldn’t own anything except what you could carry around with you and why would you want to own anything when everything would be free?

I admired and was inspired by Henry’s sense of self confidence, yet I found none of that within myself. If I just had the guts to be my true self, to live to the hilt, to fill my life with joy and love and inspiration and self respect. But I hovered between indecision and disgust, and took the route of least resistance whenever I could. In short, I sold myself out to the corporate world, the world of acceptance, what I imagined to be the expectations of others. Henry was waiting for something to push him over the edge, something he knew was coming in its own good time. He said he was afraid of his powers of adaption. I could understand that because I was a victim of mine. I was avoiding the push, frightened of being out in the streets . I lived in the shadow of my true self. Ten years passed before it all started to turn around.

Everything I had written before was museum stuff, and most writing is still museum stuff and that’s why it doesn’t catch fire, doesn’t inflame the world. I was only a mouthpiece for the ancestral race which was talking through me; even my dreams were not authentic, not bona fide Henry Miller dreams. To sit still and think one thought which would come up out of me, out of the life buoy, was a Herculean task. I didn’t lack thoughts nor words nor the power of expression – I lacked something much more important: the lever which would shut off the juice. The bloody machine wouldn’t stop, that was the difficulty. I was not only in the middle of the current but the current was running through me and I had no control over it whatever.

I remember the day I brought the machine to a dead stop and how the other mechanism, the one that was signed with my own initials and which I had made with my own hands and my own blood slowly began to function. I had gone to the theater nearby to see a vaudeville show; it was the matinee and I had a ticket for the balcony. Standing in line in the lobby, I already experienced a strange feeling of consistency. It was as though I were coagulating, becoming a recognizable consistent mass of jelly. It was like the ultimate stage in the healing of a wound. I was at the height of normality, which a very abnormal condition. Cholera might come and blow its foul breath in my mouth – it wouldn’t matter. I might bend over and kiss the ulcers of a leprous hand, and no harm could possibly come to me. There was not just a balance in this constant warfare between health and disease, which is all that most of us may hope for, but there was a plus integer in the blood which meant that, for a few moments at least, disease was completely routed. If one had the wisdom to take root in such a moment, one would never again be ill or unhappy or even die. But to leap to this conclusion is to make a jump which would take one back further than the old stone age. At that moment I wasn’t even dreaming of taking root; I was experiencing for the first time in my life the meaning of the miraculous. I was so amazed when I heard my own cogs meshing that I was willing to die then and there for the privilege of the experience.

What happened was this…As I passed the doorman holding the torn stub in my hand the lights were dimmed and the curtain went up. I stood a moment slightly dazed by the sudden darkness. As the curtain slowly rose I had the feeling that throughout the ages man had always been mysteriously stilled by this brief moment which preludes the spectacle. I could feel the curtain rising in man. And immediately I also realized that this was a symbol which was being presented to him endlessly in his sleep and that if he had been awake the players would never have taken the stage but he, Man, would have mounted the boards. I didn’t think this thought – it was a realization, as I say, and so simple and overwhelmingly clear was it that the machine stopped dead instantly and I was standing in my own presence bathed in a luminous reality. I turned my eyes away from the stage and beheld the marble staircase which I should take to go to my seat in the balcony. I saw a man slowly mounting the steps, his hand laid across the balustrade. The man could have been myself, the old self which had been sleepwalking ever since I was born. My eye didn’t take in the entire staircase, just the few steps which the man had climbed or was climbing in the moment that I took it all in. The man never reached the top of the stairs and his hand never removed from the balustrade. I felt the curtain descend, and for another few moments I was behind the scenes moving amidst the sets, like the property man suddenly roused from his sleep and not sure whether he is still dreaming or looking at a dream which is being enacted on the stage. It was as fresh and green, as strangely new as the bread and cheese lands which the Biddenden maidens saw every day of their long life joined at the hips. I saw only that which was alive! The rest faded out in a penumbra. And it was in order to keep the world alive that I rushed home without waiting to see the performance and sat down to describe the little patch of staircase which is imperishable.

I drifted through the dream and what was called reality freely, seamlessly, barely knowing who I was from one moment to the next. I was at The Bank in the three-piece suit leading a training session for my twenty-two district managers and their assistants, explaining the differences between telling someone to do something and enticing them to do it of their own accord, all the while eyeing the redheaded manager from Salinas with the enticing orange lips. Or I was in my living room watching the first lunar landing with the children, passing the joint on to Curtis or Goodall. Or perched high up in a tree up on Mt. Tamalpais twirling under LSD watching the unwary hikers passing below on their way to the summit like an owl in a nest. Or I was catching a quickie on my lunch break with Slattery’s girlfriend Jan in another lady’s apartment to which I had a key. I could be anyone or everyone all at the same time and went in and out of the endless set of personas without a second, or even a first, thought. It was madness over which I had no control.

I was on the bus of an evening on my way back across the bridge into Marin county. My day had been deadening and I was empty, mindless, as lost as a prisoner on Alcatraz island, caged within my own fears and inertia. Sitting next to me was a woman of, say, thirty-five, perhaps a wife and mother, perhaps on her way back to the nest after another endless day of mindless labor, and perhaps she was feeling somewhat as was I. We rocked with the motion of the bus reading our books or looking straight ahead. There had been no recognition of one another though I was aware of her just as I was aware of every woman that passed through my radar. At one point our knees touched from the motion of the bus. Neither of us moved and the contact continued. She was reading her book. I was looking straight ahead. Was she aware of the contact? I pressed ever so slightly against her to test the waters. No movement from her. Not a sign. I raised my leg slowly up and down. Still she did not move away from the contact. My breath was getting short and my vision blurred. I pressed gently against her leg and rubbed with my knee. Her book remained open but I could see through the corner of my eye that she was not reading but staring blindly at the page. The bus rocked on and I closed my eyes, breathing short deep breaths. I no longer tried to see what she was doing or if she was aware of the contact, and I slipped into a dream. I felt the warmth of her leg and the blood running through her veins and the pulse of her heart. I turned to her in my dream and pulled her into my arms, holding her close and warm as the bus swayed gently through the clouds. For an endless moment we held one another, strangers externally, but lovers deep within. She was a goddess and I a god in a golden land near the rising sea. All else ceased to exist; we had left the world as we had once known it and now swayed peacefully through our dream. Then the bus stopped and she rose to leave, slipping past me to the aisle where she turned and looked down into my face. She held my stare for a moment and with a small smile said, “Thank you”, and then was gone. I could not see, I could not think. I did not want to return to this reality and tried to will myself back into the dream, but she was gone, and I was alone once again in the three-piece suit riding the bus along the familiar corridors past the all too familiar schools and markets and gas stations of my life. Like two exotic caged birds we had reached through the bars, and for a moment touched one another, transforming our work-a-day lives into a moment on the primitive slopes of paradise. It was a small miracle in itself, brief, deep, as magical as a dive into a cool mountain lake on a hot summer day: brief, refreshing, unforgettable.

The ovarian world is a product of a life rhythm. The moment a child is born it becomes part of a world in which there is not only the life rhythm but the death rhythm. The frantic desire to live, to live at any cost, is not a result of the life rhythm within us, but the death rhythm. There is not only no need to keep life at any price, but, if life is undesirable, it is absolutely wrong. This keeping oneself alive, out of a blind urge to defeat death, is in itself a means of sowing death. Everyone who has not fully accepted life, who is not incrementing life, is helping to fill the world with death. To make the simplest gesture with the hand can convey the utmost sense of life; a word spoken with the whole being can give life. Activity in itself means nothing; it is often a sign of death. By simple external pressure, by force of surroundings and example, by the very climate which activity engenders, one can become a part of a monstrous death machine, such as America, for example. What does a dynamo know of life, of peace, of reality? What does any individual American dynamo know of the wisdom and energy, of the life abundant and external possessed by a ragged beggar sitting under a tree in the act of meditation? What is energy? What is life? One has only to read the stupid twaddle of the scientific and philosophic textbooks to realize how less than nothing is the wisdom of these energetic Americans. Listen, they had me on the run, these crazy horsepower fiends; in order to break their insane rhythms, their death rhythms, I had to resort to a wave length which, until I found the proper sustenance in my bowels, would at least nullify the rhythm they had set up. Certainly I did not need the grotesque, cumbersome, antediluvian desk which I had installed in the parlor; certainly I didn’t need twelve empty chairs placed around it in a semicircle; I needed only elbow room in which to write and a thirteenth chair which would take me out of the zodiac they were using and put me in a heaven beyond heaven. But when you drive a man almost crazy and when, to his own surprise perhaps, he finds that he still has some resistance, some powers of his own, then you are apt to find such a man acting very much like a primitive being. Such a man is apt not only to become stubborn and dogged, but superstitious, a believer in magic and a practicer of magic. Such a man is beyond religion – it is his religiousness he is suffering from. Such a man becomes a monomaniac, bent on doing one thing only and that is to break the evil spell which has been put upon him. Such a man is beyond throwing bombs, beyond revolt; he wants to stop reacting, whether inertly or ferociously. This man, of all men on earth, wants the act to be a manifestation of life. If, in the realization of his terrible need, he begins to act regressively, to become unsocial, to stammer and stutter, to prove so utterly unadapted as to be incapable of earning a living, know that this man has found his way back to the womb and source of life and that tomorrow, instead of the contemptible object of ridicule which you have made of him, he will stand forth as a man in his own right and all the powers of the world will be of no avail against him.

Out of the crude cipher with which he communicates from his prehistoric desk with the archaic men of the world a new language builds up which cuts through the death language of the day like wireless through a storm. There is no magic in this wave length any more than there is magic in the womb. Men are lonely and out of communication with one another because all their inventions speak only of death. Death is the automation which rules the world of activity. Death is silent, because it has no mouth. Death has never expressed anything. Death is wonderful too – after life. Only one like myself who has opened his mouth and spoken, only one who has said Yes, Yes, Yes, and again Yes! can open wide his arms to death and know no fear. Death is a reward, yes! Death as a result of fulfillment, yes! Death as a crown and shield, yes! But not death from the root, isolating men, making them bitter and fearful and lonely, giving them fruitless energy, filling them with a will that can only say No! The first word any man writes when he has found himself, his own rhythm, which is the life rhythm, is Yes! Everything he writes thereafter is Yes, Yes, Yes – Yes in a thousand million ways. No dynamo, no matter how huge – not even a dynamo of a hundred million dead souls – can combat one man saying Yes!

My life was a tropical storm on a path of destruction. Everything I touched with love crumbled in my crude hands. I possessed the will of a great wind, bending ancient and solid trees until they broke with a shattering scream. The will for life that had been suppressed within me blew forth now, leveling my landscape and leaving my world in a shambles of scattered lives. It was useless for me to stand against this power and I surrendered completely, letting the storm carry me where it would. I was a demon, and I accepted my fate.

The job at The Bank began to unravel after nearly fifteen years of building a “successful” career. I found that climbing down the ladder to success was much more painful and difficult than climbing up. I drank martinis for lunch, tossed my in-box into the trash and wandered into the streets. Everyone was busily scurrying about at First and Market, isolated from one another in the world of duty. I roamed down to the docks and listened to the oily bay waters slap against the planks and the seagulls screech. In a lunch packed bar I would order a beer and then walk out absentmindedly, leaving the beer on the counter and the bartender eyeing me suspiciously. I belonged nowhere, and nowhere was where I was headed.

The break came quick and clean as a death wish. After a late night with a girlfriend, I came home empty and defeated. The children were sleeping innocently in their beds and I sat with them for a while watching their breathing and marveling at their beauty and peace of mind. The wife was furious, naturally, fuming into a four-olive vodka martini. “I want you out!”, she spat as I entered the kitchen. Simple as that, the words neither one of us could previously bring ourselves to say. “This is the end!”, she added, and it was. I had no fight; I had no will. She could have told me to dive off the Golden Gate Bridge and I would have done so without a whimper. This was the end; the end of the day-job-suburban-lifestyle experiment, in most ways, a complete and utter failure. The children were precious and vulnerable and needed their father in their lives, but staying and continuing the insanity would have made things for them even worse. This was the end.

As daylight dawned that morning I packed up two old ratty suitcases with some underwear, a few books, a shaver and a toothbrush. The rest was hers; the house, the car, the dog, and the five cats. She could keep the TV, the dishes, the washing machine and drier, the knick knacks, the photographs, the lawn furniture. I had no need of any of the stuff that had made up our insane lives. We drove the children to school telling them I was moving into The City and they could come and visit any time they wanted. She drove me across the bridge, too angry and broken to speak. On an impulse she suddenly pulled over on Van Ness and said, “Get out!”, and I did, and watched the old Volvo steam away forever. It was over. I found out years later that just at this moment Gene was driving by in his old blue VW bug and witnessed the whole scene. We laughed when he told me about it and I said, “You bugger, why didn’t you pick me up?” “The scene was complete in itself”, he answered, “I could see that it was a classic moment and I didn’t want to intrude.” There I stood on Van Ness Avenue with my two raggedy suitcases. I picked a direction and started walking. With each step my spirits lightened. It was a beautiful morning in The City and I had nowhere to go and nothing to do. The great wind in my spirit had quieted and the storm had abated. After a few blocks I was whistling the theme from the movie “The Bridge Over The River Kwai” and swinging the suitcases happily. And then, in a moment of gratitude, I sat the suitcases down, opened my arms to the new life that suddenly seemed so filled with beauty and promise, raised my head to the morning sun above and said with a joyful voice of gratitude, “Yes!”

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WikipediA on Henry Miller