Third or Fourth Day of Spring
5 May 2008
Black Spring
by: Henry Valentine Miller
Third or Fourth Day of Spring has within its crumbling pink petals, all that I ever will have need of. If this piece would be all that I am allowed of the complete collection of the illustrious Henry Miller, it would most suffice. If this piece would be all that I am allowed of all the great works of all the illustrious writers, it would surpass that which suffices.
Flipping through my rough-and-tumble copy of Black Spring five years ago I settled into page nineteen, reading: The house wherein I passed the most important years of my life had only three rooms. The day was quite like today, as it was certainly the onset of May with rain hanging heavy in the grey air, dripping with the humidity of an impending spring shower. I sat under the stone eaves on a stone balcony four flights above via Cicerone, Rome. Could it have been Chance that brought me to this piece at that time? My mind was so fresh, so supple, that in one grand inhale, I had digested it all.
On and on and on, I continue what I then thought I would only ingest once. Once is not enough. Five years and I can not shake those words which fired through my senses like so many star-flamed rockets; five years and their chorus goes on like an unstoppable rallentando; five years and the sharp truth of the words has not grown dull with time, but instead, has sharpened the instrument through which I decipher them. Third or Fourth Day of Spring has been typed by a man with a heavy hand into my lineaments; they have become an inextricable part of who I found myself to be.
The dreamers dream from the neck up, their bodies securely strapped into the electric chair. To imagine a new world is to live it daily, each thought, each glance, each step, each gesture killing and recreating, death always a step in advance.
As I reread I become maudlin. It is as if the words of this piece are no longer words to me, as if they have become the fertile earth that has seeded. I strongly believe that everything that Henry Miller ever wanted to say was said in this short piece. I believe that everything that can be said about our cumulative and individual existence is said in this short piece. I believe that there is nothing before and after this piece. The Third or Fourth Day of Spring is all.
The world is a mirror of myself dying, the world not dying any more than I die, I more alive a thousand years from now than this moment and this world in which I am now dying also more alive then than now though dead a thousand years. When each thing is lived to the end there is no death and no regrets, neither is there a false springtime; each moment lived pushes open a greater, wider horizon from which there is no escape save the living.
I have found myself, on nights of solitude, listening to this recording of Third or Fourth Day of Spring. To listen to Henry Miller read his own words, to listen without reading the words, just to listen, has brought what I discovered five years ago to another deep-level of meaningfulness. To listen to Henry Miller read Third or Fourth Day of Spring makes me maudlin. As he says in his rambling introduction, “There crept into it an added intensity. . . fever. . . tempo that I don’t think the other books had. It was meant to be a very joyous book though it contains some terrible things. At bottom, what I think I wanted to convey was joy, even more than that, perhaps, ecstasy.”
I believe it is ecstasy that I feel when I read this piece or listen to it; though not the kind of ecstasy that one accompanies with the word, an ecstasy that goes beyond any physical embodiment; an ecstasy that takes me up and over my perpetually conceiving self; up and over any thoughts spawned out of the repetition of my days. Beyond. To live beyond illusion or with it? that’s the question.
Always summer and everything true to pattern. If it’s a horse it’s a horse for all time. If it’s apoplexy it’s apoplexy, and not St. Vitus’s Dance. No early morning whores, no gardenias. No dead cats in the gutter, no sweat and perspiration. If it be a lip it must be a lip that trembles eternally.
Bracciano Italy
May 2008
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