The following is one of my favourite passages of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer."One walks the streets knowing
that he is mad, possessed, because it is only too obvious that these
cold, indifferent faces are the visages of one's keepers. Here all
boundaries fade away and the world reveals itself for the mad
slaughterhouse that it is. The treadmill stretches away to infinitude,
the hatches are closed down tight, logic runs rampant, with bloody
cleaver flashing. The air is chill and stagnant, the language
apocalyptic. Not an exit sign anywhere; no issue save death. A blind
alley at the end of which is a scaffold.
An eternal city, Paris! More eternal than Rome, more splendorous
than Nineveh. The very navel of the world to which, like a blind and
faltering idiot, one crawls back on hands and knees. And like a cork
that has drifted to the dead center of the ocean, one floats here in the
scum and wrack of the seas, listless, hopeless, heedless even of a
passing Columbus. The cradles of civilization are the putrid sinks of
the world, the charnel house to which the stinking wombs confide
their bloody packages of flesh and bone.
The streets were my refuge. And no man can understand the glamor
of the streets until he is obliged to take refuge in them, until he has
become a straw that is tossed here and there by every zephyr that
blows. One passes along a street on a wintry day and, seeing a dog for
sale, one is moved to tears. While across the way, cheerful as a
cemetery, stands a miserable hut that calls itself "Hôtel du Tombeau
des Lapins." That makes one laugh, laugh fit to die. Until one notices
that there are hotels everywhere, for rabbits, dogs, lice, emperors,
cabinet ministers, pawnbrokers, horse knackers, and so on. And
almost every other one is an "Hôtel de l'Avenir." Which makes one
more hysterical still. So many hotels of the future! No hotels in the
past participle, no subjunctive modes, no conjunctivitis. Everything is
hoary, grisly, bristling with merriment, swollen with the future, like a
gumboil. Drunk with this lecherous eczema of the future, I stagger
over to the Place Violet, the colors all mauve and slate, the doorways
so low that only dwarfs and goblins could hobble in; over the dull
cranium of Zola the chimneys are belching pure coke, while the
Madonna of Sandwiches listens with cabbage ears to the bubbling of
the gas tanks, those beautiful bloated toads which squat by the
roadside.
Why do I suddenly recollect the Passage des Thermopyles? Because
that day a woman addressed her puppy in the apocalyptic language of
the slaughterhouse, and the little bitch, she understood what this
greasy slut of a midwife was saying. How that depressed me! More
even than the sight of those whimpering curs that were being sold on
the Rue Brandon, because it was not the dogs which filled me so with
pity, but the huge iron railing, those rusty spikes which seemed to
stand between me and my rightful life. In the pleasant little lane near
the Abattoir de Vaugirard (Abattoir Hippophagique), which is called
the Rue des Périchaux, I had noticed here and there signs of blood.
Just as Strindberg in his madness had recognized omens and portents
in the very flagging of the Pension Orfila, so, as I wandered aimlessly
through this muddy lane bespattered with blood, fragments of the past
detached themselves and floated listlessly before my eyes, taunting me
with the direst forebodings. I saw my own blood being spilled, the
muddy road stained with it, as far back as I could remember, from the
very beginning doubtless. One is ejected into the world like a dirty
little mummy; the roads are slippery with blood and no one knows
why it should be so. Each one is traveling his own way and, though
the earth be rotting with good things, there is no time to pluck the
fruits; the procession scrambles toward the exit sign, and such a panic
is there, such a sweat to escape, that the weak and the helpless are
trampled into the mud and their cries are unheard.
My world of human beings had perished; I was utterly alone in the
world and for friends I had the streets, and the streets spoke to me in
that sad, bitter language compounded of human misery, yearning,
regret, failure, wasted effort. Passing under the viaduct along the Rue
Broca, one night after I had been informed that Mona was ill and
starving, I suddenly recalled that it was here in the squalor and gloom
of this sunken street, terrorized perhaps by a premonition of the
future, that Mona clung to me and with a quivering voice begged me
to promise that I would never leave her, never, no matter what
happened. And, only a few days later, I stood on the platform of the
Gare St. Lazare and I watched the train pull out, the train that was
bearing her away: she was leaning out of the window, just as she had
leaned out of the window when I left her in New York, and there was
that same, sad, inscrutable smile on her face, that last-minute look
which is intended to convey so much, but which is only a mask that is
twisted by a vacant smile. Only a few days before, she had clung to
me desperately and then something happened, something which is not
even clear to me now, and of her own volition she boarded the train
and she was looking at me again with that sad, enigmatic smile which
baffles me, which is unjust, unnatural, which I distrust with all my
soul. And now it is I, standing in the shadow of the viaduct, who reach
out for her who cling to her desperately and there is that same
inexplicable smile on my lips, the mask that I have clamped down
over my grief. I can stand here and smile vacantly, and no matter how
fervid my prayers, no matter how desperate my longing, there is an
ocean between us; there she will stay and starve, and here I shall walk
from one street to the next, the hot tears scalding my face.
It is that sort of cruelty which is embedded in the streets; it is that
which stares out from the walls and terrifies us when suddenly we
respond to a nameless fear, when suddenly our souls are invaded by a
sickening panic. It is that which gives the lamposts their ghoulish
twists, which makes them beckon to us and lure us to their strangling
grip; it is that which makes certain houses appear like the guardians of
secret crimes and their blind windows like the empty sockets of eyes
that have seen too much. It is that sort of thing, written into the human
physiognomy of the streets which makes me flee when overhead I
suddenly see inscribed "Impasse Satan." That which makes me
shudder when at the very entrance to the Mosque I observe that it is
written: "Mondays and Thursdays tuberculosis; Wednesdays and
Fridays syphilis." In every Metro station there are grinning skulls that
greet you with "Défendez-vous contre la syphilis!" Wherever there are
walls, there are posters with bright venomous crabs heralding the
approach of cancer. No matter where you go, no matter what you
touch, there is cancer and syphilis. It is written in the sky; it flames
and dances, like an evil portent. It has eaten into our souls and we are
nothing but a dead thing like the moon."
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