Free Black Spring by Henry Miller Page A

buried in a cemetery! I won’t have any imbeciles standing over me with a sprinkler and looking mournful. I won’t have it!
    While these thoughts have been passing through my head I have been inadvertently smearing the trees and the terraces with a dry brush. The trees gleam now like a coat of mail, the boughs are studded with silver and turquoise links. If I had a crucifixion on hand I could cover the bodies of the martyrs with jeweled pockmarks. On the wall opposite me is a scene from the wilds of Ethiopia. The body of Christ crucified lies on the floor covered with smallpox; the bloodthirsty Jews -black, Ethiopian Jews-are pounding him with iron quoits. They have a most ferociously gleeful expression. I bought the picture because of the pockmarks, why I didn’t know at the time. It’s only now that I’ve discovered the reason. Only now that I recall a certain picture over a cellar on the Bowery, entitled “Death on Bugs.” Happened I was just coming away from a lunatic, a professional visit which had not been altogether unpleasant. It’s broad afternoon and the dirty throat of the Bowery is choked with clots of phlegm. Just below Cooper Square three bums are stretched out flat beside a lamppost, a la Breughel. A penny arcade is going full blast. A weird, unearthly chant rises up from the streets, like a man with a cleaver fighting his way through delirium tremens. And there, over the slanting cellar door, is this painting called “Death on Bugs.” A naked woman with long flaxen hair lies on the bed scratching herself. The bed is floating in the middle air and about it dances a man with a squirt gun. He has that same imbecilic air about him as these Jews with the iron quoits. The picture is stippled with pockmarks -to represent that cosmopolitan bloodsucking wingless depressed bug of reddish-brown color and vile odor which infests houses and beds and goes by the formidable name of Cimex lectularius.
    And here I am now with a dry brush applying the stigmata to the three trees. The clouds are covered with bedbugs, the volcano is belching bedbugs; the bedbugs are scrambling down the steep chalk cliffs and drowning themselves in the river. I am like that young immigrant on the second floor of a poem by some Ivanovich or other who tosses about on the bedsprings haunted by the misery of his starved, wasted life, despairing of all the beauty beyond his grasp. My whole life seems to be wrapped up in that dirty handkerchief, the Bowery, which I walked through day after day, year in and year out-a dose of smallpox whose scars never disappear. If I had a name then it was Cimex Lectularius. If I had a home it was a slide trombone. If I had a passion it was to wash myself clean.
    In a fury now I take the brush and dipping it in all the colors successively I commence to smudge the cemetery gates. I smudge and smudge until the lower half of the picture is as thick as chocolate, until the picture actually smells of pigment. And when it is completely ruined I sit there with a vacant enjoyment and twiddle my thumbs.
    And then suddenly I get a real inspiration. I take it to the sink and after soaking it well I scrub it with the nail brush. I scrub and scrub and then I hold the picture upside down, letting the colors coagulate. Then gin gerly, very gingerly, I flatten it out on my desk. It’s a masterpiece, I tell you! I’ve been studying it for the last three hours….
    You may say it’s just an accident, this masterpiece, and so it is! But then, so is the Twenty-third Psalm. Every birth is miraculous-and inspired. What appears now before my eyes is the result of innumerable mistakes, withdrawals, erasures, hesitations; it is also the result of certitude. You would like to give the nail brush credit, and the water credit. Do so-by all means. Give everybody and everything credit. Credit Dante, credit Spinoza, credit Hieronymus Bosch. Credit Cash and debit Societe Anonyme. Put in the Day Book: Tante Melia. So. Draw a balance. Out by