On The Ovarian Trolley, Occupy the Uterus

"But I had no choice about the mother who was to deliver me. Perhaps I was lucky not to have been born an idiot, considering all the circumstances. One thing seems clear, however, and this is a hangover from the 25, that I was born with a crucifixion complex. That is, to be more precise, I was born a fanatic. Fanatic! I remember that word being hurled at me from early childhood on. By my parents especially. What is a fanatic? One who believes so passionately and acts desperately upon what he believes. I was always believing in something and so getting into trouble. The more my hands were slapped the more firmly I believed. I believed, and the rest of the world did not!If it were only a question of enduring punishment one could go on believing till the end; but the way of the world is more insidious than that. Instead of being punished you are undermined, hollowed out, the ground taken from under your feet...It's a negativism that causes you to overreach yourself. You are perpetually spending your energy in the act of balancing yourself. You are seized with a soft of spiritual vertigo, you totter on the brink, your hair stands on end, you can't believe that beneath your feet lies an immeasurable abyss. It comes about through excess of enthusiasm, through passionate desire to embrace people, to show them your love The more you reach out toward the world the more the world retreats. Nobody wants real love, real hatred. Nobody wants you to put your hand in his sacred entrails, that's only for the priest in the hour of sacrifice. While you live, while the blood's still warm, you are to pretend that there is no such thing as blood and no such thing as a skeleton beneath the covering flesh. Keep off the grass! That's the motto by which people live by."

Tropics of Capricorn, Henry Miller

Deterritorialization

In the  moment all is  dear to me, dear that  in this logic there is no
redemption, the city itself  being the highest form of  madness and each and
every part, organic or inorganic, an expression of this same madness. I feel
absurdly and humbly great, not  as megalomaniac,  but as human spore, as the
dead sponge of life swollen to saturation. I no longer look into the eyes of
the woman I hold in my arms but I swim through, head and arms  and legs, and
I see that behind the  sockets of the eyes there is a region unexplored, the
world  of  futurity,  and here there  is  no  logic whatever, just the still
germination of events unbroken by night and day,  by yesterday and tomorrow.
The eye, accustomed to concentration on points in space, now concentrates on
points in time; the eye sees forward and backward at will. The eye which was
the I of  the self no longer exists; this  selfless eye neither reveals  nor
illuminates.  It  travels  along  the  line of  the  horizon,  a  ceaseless,
uninformed voyager. Trying to  retain the  lost body I grew  in logic as the
city, a point  digit  in  the anatomy  of  perfection. I  grew beyond my own
death, spiritually  bright and hard.  I was divided into endless yesterdays,
endless tomorrows, resting  only  on the cusp of the event, a wall with many
windows, but  the house gone. I must shatter the walls and windows, the last
shell  of  the lost  body,  if I am to rejoin the  present. That is why I no
longer look  into the  eyes  or  through the eyes, but by the legerdemain of
will swim  through the eyes, head and arms and legs to explore  the curve of
vision. I  see  around myself as  the mother who bore  me once saw round the
comers of  time. I  have broken  the wall created by  birth  and the line of
voyage is  round and  unbroken,  even as  the navel. No  form,  no image, no
architecture,  only concentric flights of  sheer madness.  I am the arrow of
the dream's  substantiality. I verify by flight.  I  nullify by  dropping to
earth.

Henry Miller Tropics of Cancer

Pre-Farewell Dublin