Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch

by Miller, Henry

  On the wall by the window, where he had arranged his writing table caticornered, there were always pinned up two or three charts of subjects whose horoscopes he was studying. He kept them there at his elbow just as a chess player keeps a board handy on which he has a problem arranged. He believed in allowing time for his interpretations to simmer. His own chart hung beside the others in a special niche.

  He regarded it at frequent intervals, much as a mariner would a barometer. He was always waiting for an “opening.” In a chart, he told me, death manifested itself when all the exits were blocked. It was difficult, he averred, to detect the advent of death in advance. It was much easier to see it after a person had died; then everything became crystal clear, dramatic from a graphic standpoint.

  What I recall most vividly are the red and blue pencil marks he employed to indicate the progress or regression of the span of chance in his chart. It was like watching the movement of a pendulum, a slow moving pendulum which only a man of infinite patience would bother to follow. If it swung a little this way, he was almost jubilant; if it swung a little the other way, he was depressed. What he expected of an “opening” I still do not know, since he was never prepared to make any apparent effort to improve his situation. Perhaps he expected no more than a breather. All he could possibly hope for, given his temperament, was a windfall. Certainly nothing in the way of a job could have meant anything to him. His one and only desire was to continue his researches. Seemingly, he had reconciled himself to his limitations. He was not a man of action, not a brilliant writer who might some day hope to liberate himself by the pen, nor was he flexible and yielding enough to beg his way. He was simply Moricand, the personality so clearly revealed by the chart which he himself had drawn up. A “subject” with a bad Saturn, among other things. A sad wizard who in moments of desperation would endeavor to extract a thin ray of promise from his star Regulus. In short, a victim doomed to live a dolorous, circumscribed life.

  “We all get a break some time or other,” I used to say to him. “It can’t rain all the time! And what about that saying—‘It’s an ill wind that blows no one some good’?”

  If he was in a mood to listen I might even go further and say: “Why don’t you forget the stars for a while? Why not take a vacation and act as if fortune were yours? Who knows what might happen? You might meet a man in the street, an utter stranger, who would be the means of opening these doors you regard as locked. There is such a thing as grace too. It could happen, you know, if you were in the right mood, if you were prepared to let something happen. And if you forgot what was written in the sky.”

  To a speech of this sort he would give me one of those strange looks which signified many things. He would even throw me a smile, one of those tender, wistful smiles which an indulgent parent gives a child who poses an impossible problem. Nor would he rush to offer the answer which he had ever at his disposal and which, no doubt, he was weary of stating when thus cornered. In the pause which followed he gave the impression that he was first testing his own convictions, that he was rapidly surveying (for the thousandth time) all that he had ever said or thought about the subject, that he was even giving himself an injection of doubt, widening and deepening the problem, giving it dimensions which neither I nor anyone else could imagine, before slowly, ponderously, coldly and logically formulating the opening phrases of his defense.

  “Mon vieux,” I can hear him saying, “One must understand what is meant by chance. The universe operates according to law, and these laws obtain as much for man’s destiny as for the birth and movements of the planets.” Leaning back in his comfortable swivel chair, veering slightly round to focus better on his chart, he would add: “Look at that!” He meant the peculiar and particular impasse in which he was fixed at the moment. Then, extracting my chart from the portfolio which he always kept handy, he would beg me to examine it with him. “The only chance for me at this moment,” he would say most solemnly, “is you. There you are!” And he would indicate how and where I fitted into the picture. “You and that angel, Anaïs. Without you two I would be a goner!”

  “But why don’t you look at it more positively?” I would exclaim. “If we are there, Anaïs and I, if we are all that you credit us with being, why don’t you put all your faith and trust in us? Why don’t you let us help you to free yourself? There are no limits to what one person can do for another, is that not so?”

  Of course he had an answer to that. His great failing was that he had an answer for everything. He did not deny the power of faith. What he would say quite simply was that he was a man to whom faith had been denied. It was there in his chart, the absence of faith. What could one do? What he failed to add was that he had chosen the path of knowledge, and that in doing so he had clipped his own wings.

  Only years later did he offer me a glimpse into the nature and origin of this castration which he referred to as lack of faith. It had to do with his boyhood, with the neglect and indifference of his parents, the perverse cruelty of his schoolmasters, one in particular, who had humiliated and tortured him in inhuman fashion. It was an ugly, woeful story, quite enough to account for his loss of morale, his spiritual degradation.

  As always before a war, there was fever in the air. With the end approaching, everything became distorted, magnified, speeded up. The wealthy were as active as bees or ants, redistributing their funds and assets, their mansions, their yachts, their gilt-edged bonds, their mine holdings, their jewels, their art treasures. I had at the time a good friend who was flying back and forth from one cantinent to another catering to these panicky clients who were trying to get out from under. Fabulous were the tales he told me. Yet so familiar. So disgustingly familiar. (Can anyone imagine an army of millionaires?) Fabulous too were the tales of another friend, a chemical engineer, who would turn up at intervals for dinner, just back from China, Manchuria, Mongolia, Tibet, Persia, Afghanistan, wherever there was deviltry afoot. And always with the same story—of intrigue, plunder, bribery, treachery, plots and projects of the most diabolical sort. The war was still a year or so away, but the signs were unmistakable—not only for the Second World War but for the wars and revolutions to follow.

  Even the “bohemians” were being routed out of their trenches. Amazing how many young intellectuals were already dislocated, dispossessed, already being pushed about like pawns in the service of their unknown masters. Every day I was receiving visits from the most unexpected individuals. There was only one question in every one’s mind: when? Meanwhile make the most of it! And we did, we who were hanging on till the last boat call.

  In this merry, devil-may-care atmosphere Moricand took no part. He was hardly the sort to invite for a festive evening which promised to end up in a brawl, a drunken stupor, or a visit from the police. Indeed, the thought never entered my head. When I did invite him over for a meal I would carefully select the two or three guests who were to join us. They were usually the same ones each time. Astrological buddies, so to speak.

  Once he called on me unannounced, a rare breach of protocol for Moricand. He seemed elated and explained that he had been strolling about the quays all afternoon. Finally he fished a small package out of his coat pocket and handed it to me. “For you!” he said, with much emotion in his voice. From the way he said it I understood that he was offering a gift which only I could appreciate to the full.

  The book, for that’s what it was, was Balzac’s Seraphita.

  Had it not been for Seraphita I doubt very much that my adventure with Moricand would have terminated in the manner it did. It will be seen shortly what a price I paid for this precious gift.

  What I wish to stress at this point is that, coincident with the feverishness of the times, the increased tempo, the peculiar derangement which everyone suffered, writers more than others perhaps, there was noticeable, in my own case at any rate, a quickening of the spiritual pulse. The individuals who were thrown across my path, the incidents which occurred daily and which to another would have seemed l
ike trifles, all had a very special significance in my mind. There was an enchainement which was not only stimulating and exciting but often hallucinating. Just to take a walk into the outskirts of Paris—Montrouge, Gentilly, Kremlin-Bicêtre, Ivry—was sufficient to unbalance me for the rest of the day. I enjoyed being unbalanced, derailed, disoriented early in the morning. (The walks I refer to were “constitutionals,” taken before breakfast. My mind free and empty, I was making myself physically and spiritually prepared for long sieges at the machine.) Taking the rue de la Tombe-Issoire, I would head for the outer boulevards, then dive into the outskirts, letting my feet lead me where they would. Coming back, I always steered instinctively for the Place de Rungis, which in some mysterious way connected itself with certain phases of the film L’Age d’or, and more particularly with Luis Bunuel himself. With its queer street names, its atmosphere of not belonging, its special assortment of gamins, urchins and monsters who hailed from some other world, it was for me an eerie and seductive neighborhood. Often I took a seat on a public bench, closed my eyes for a few moments to sink below the surface, then suddenly opened them to look at the scene with the vacant stare of a somnambulist. Goats from the banlieue, gangplanks, douche bags, safety belts, iron trusses, passerelles and sauterelles floated before my glazed eyeballs, together with headless fowl, beribboned antlers, rusty sewing machines, dripping ikons and other unbelievable phenomena. It was not a community or neighborhood but a vector, a very special vector created wholly for my artistic benefit, created expressly to tie me into an emotional knot. Walking up the rue de la Fontaine à Mulard, I struggled frantically to contain my ecstasy, struggled to fix and hold in my mind (until after breakfast) three thoroughly disparate images which, if I could fuse them successfully, would enable me to force a wedge into a difficult passage (of my book) which I had been unable to penetrate the day before. The rue Brillat-Savarin, running like a snake past the Place, balances the works of Eliphas Lévi, the rue Butte aux Cailles (farther along) evokes the Stations of the Cross, the rue Félicien Rops (at another angle) sets bells to ringing and with it the whir of pigeon wings. If I was suffering from a hangover, as I frequently was, all these associations, deformations and interpenetrations became even more quixotically vivid and colorful. On such days it was nothing to receive in the first mail a second or third copy of the I Ching, an album of Scriabin, a slim volume concerning the life of James Ensor or a treatise on Pico della Mirandola. Beside my desk, as a reminder of recent festivities, the empty wine bottles were always neatly ranged: Nuits Saint-Georges, Gevrey-Chambertin, Clos-Veugeot, Vosne Romanée, Meursault, Traminer, Château Haut-Brion, Chambolle-Musigny, Montrachet, Beaune, Beaujolais, Anjou and that “vin de prédilection” of Balzac’s—Vouvray. Old friends, even though drained to the last drop. Some still retained a slight bouquet.

  Breakfast, chez moi. Strong coffee with hot milk, two or three delicious warm croissants with sweet butter and a touch of jam. And with the breakfast a snatch of Segovia. An emperor couldn’t do better.

  Belching a little, picking my teeth, my fingers tingling, I take a quick look around (as if to see if everything’s in order!), lock the door, and plunk myself in front of the machine. Set to go. My brain afire.

  But what drawer of my Chinese cabinet mind will I open first? Each one contains a recipe, a prescription, a formula. Some of the items go back to 6,000 B.C. Some still further back.

  First I must blow the dust away. Particularly the dust of Paris, so fine, so penetrating, so nearly invisible. I must submerge to the root taps—Williamsburg, Canarsie, Greenpoint, Hoboken, the Gowanus Canal, Erie Basin, to playmates now moldering in the grave, to places of enchantment like Glendale, Glen Island, Sayville, Patchogue, to parks and islands and coves now transformed into garbage dumps. I must think French and write English, be very still and talk wild, act the sage and remain a fool or a dunce. I must balance what is unbalanced without falling off the tightrope. I must summon to the hall of vertigo the lyre known as the Brooklyn Bridge yet preserve the flavor and the aroma of the Place de Rungis. It must be of this moment but pregnant with the ebb of the Great Return….

  And it was just at this time—too much to do, too much to see, too much to drink, too much to digest—that, like heralds from distant yet strangely familiar worlds, the books began to come. Nijinsky’s Diary, The Eternal Husband, The Spirit of Zen, The Voice of the Silence, The Absolute Collective, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, l’ Eubage, the Life of Milarepa, War Dance, Musings of a Chinese Mystic….

  Some day, when I acquire a house with a large room and bare walls, I intend to compose a huge chart or graph which will tell better than any book the story of my friends, and another telling the story of the books in my life. One on each wall, facing each other, impregnating each other, erasing each other. No man can hope to live long enough to round out these happenings, these unfathomable experiences, in words. It can only be done symbolically, graphically, as the stars write their constellated mysterium.

  Why do I speak thus? Because during this period—too much to do, too much to see, taste, and so forth—the past and the future converged with such clarity and precision that not only friends and books but creatures, objects, dreams, historical events, monuments, streets, names of places, walks, encounters, conversations, reveries, half-thoughts, all came sharply into focus, broke into angles, chasms, waves, shadows, revealing to me in one harmonious, understandable pattern their essence and significance.

  Where my friends were concerned, I had only to think a moment in order to evoke a company or a regiment. Without effort on my part they ranged themselves in order of magnitude, influence, duration, proximity, spiritual weight and density, and so on. As they took their stations I myself seemed to be moving through the ether with the sweep and rhythm of an absent-minded angel, yet falling in with each in turn at exactly the right zodiacal point and at precisely the destined moment, good or bad, to tune in. What a medley of apparitions they presented! Some were shrouded in fog, some sharp as sentinels, some rigid as phantom ice-bergs, some wilted like autumn flowers, some racing toward death, some rolling along like drunks on rubber wheels, some pushing laboriously through endless mazes, some skating over the heads of their comrades as if muffled in luminol, some lifting crushing weights, some glued to the books in which they burrowed, some trying to fly though anchored with ball and chain, but all of them vivid, named, classified, identified according to need, depth, insight, flavor, aura, fragrance and pulse beat. Some were suspended like blazing planets, others like cold, distant stars. Some burgeoned with frightening rapidity, like novae, then faded into dust; some moved along discreetly, always within calling distance, as it were, like beneficent planets. Some stood apart, not haughtily but as if waiting to be summoned—like authors (Novalis, for example) whose names alone are so freighted with promise that one postpones reading them until that ideal moment which never arrives.

  And Moricand, had he any part in all this scintillating turmoil? I doubt it. He was merely part of the décor, another phenomenon pertinent to the epoch. I can see him still as he then appeared in my mind’s eye. In a penumbra he lurks, cool, gray, imperturbable, with a twinkle in his eyes and a metallic “Ouais!” shaping his lips. As if saying to himself: “Ouais! Know it all. Heard it before. Forgot it long ago. Ouais! Tu parles! The labyrinth, the chamois with the golden horns, the grail, the argonaut, the kermesse à la Breughel, the wounded groin of Scorpio, the profanation of the host, the Areopagite, translunacy, symbiotic neurosis, and in a wilderness of pebbles a lone katydid. Keep it up, the wheel is softly turning. A time comes when….” Now he is bent over his pantâcles. Reads with a Geiger counter. Unlatching his gold fountain pen, he writes in purple milk: Porphyry, Proclus, Plotinus, Saint Valentin, Julian the Apostate, Hermes Trismegistus, Apollonius of Tyana, Claude Saint-Martin. In his vest pocket he carries a little phial; it contains myrrh, frankincense and a dash of wild sarsparilla. The odor of sanctity! On the little finger of his left hand he wears a jade ring marked with
yin and yang. Cautiously he brings out a heavy brass watch, a stem-winder, and lays it on the floor. It is 9:30, sidereal time, the moon on the cusp of panic, the ecliptic freckled with cometary warts. Saturn is there with her ominous milky hue. “Ouais!” he exclaims, as if clinching the argument. “I say nothing against anything. I observe. I analyze. I calculate. I distillate. Wisdom is becoming, but knowledge is the certainty of certitude. To the surgeon his scalpel, to the gravedigger his pick and shovel, to the analyst his dream books, to the fool his dunce cap. As for me, I have a bellyache. The atmosphere is too rarefied, the stones too heavy to digest. Kali Yuga. Only 9,765,854 years to go and we will be out of the snake pit. Du courage, mon vieux!”

  Let us take a last look backward. The year is 1939. The month is June. I am not waiting for the Huns to rout me out. I am taking a vacation. Another few hours and I shall be leaving for Greece.

  All that remains of my presence in the studio at the Villa Seurat is my natal chart done in chalk on the wall facing the door. It’s for whomever takes over to ponder on. I’m sure it will be an officer of the line. Perhaps an erudite.

  Oh yes, and on the other wall, high up near the ceiling, these two lines:

  Jetzt müsste die Welt versinken,

  Jetzt muszte ein Wunder gescheh’n.

  Clear, what?

  And now it is my last evening with my good friend Moricand. A modest repast in a restaurant on the rue Fontaine, diagonally opposite the living quarters of the Father of Surrealism. We spoke of him as we broke bread. Nadja once more. And the “Profanation of the Host.”

  He is sad, Moricand. So am I, in a faint way. I am only partly there. My mind is already reaching out for Rocamadour where I expect to be on the morrow. In the morning Moricand will once again face his chart, observe the sway of the pendulum—undoubtedly it has moved to the left!—see if Regulus, Rigel, Antares or Betelgeuse can aid him just a wee, wee bit. Only 9,765,854 years before the climate changes….