The Colossus of Maroussi by Henry Miller Page B

not waiting for a yes or a no, his eyes becoming glazed by the surge of inward light, he would actually tumble backwards into the deep well in which all his stories had their source and, gripping the slippery walls of his narrative with finger and toe, he would slowly clamber to the surface, puffing, gasping, shaking himself like a dog to free himself of the last remaining particles of wrack and slime and stardust. Sometimes, in taking the backward plunge, he would hit the bottom with such a thud that he was speechless: one could look into the pupil of his eyes and see him lying there helpless as a starfish, a great sprawling mass of flesh lying face up and counting the stars, counting and naming them in fat, unbroken stupefaction as if to make a colossally unthinkable pattern on which to weave the story which would come to his lips when he would catch his breath again.
     
     
    The great starfish, as I was saying, was sound asleep before ever we got to Nauplia. He had sprawled out on the bench, leaving me to circle about the Parc Monceau where he had dropped me in a taxi. I was dazed. I went up on deck and paced back and forth, purring to myself, laughing aloud now and then, gesticulating, mimicking his gestures in anticipation of recounting the more succulent fragments of his narrative to my friend Durrell or to Seferiades upon my return to Athens. Several times I slipped back to the saloon to take a look at him, to gaze at that tiny mouth of his which was pried open now in a prolonged mute gasp like the mouth of a fish suffocating with air. Once I approached close to him and bending over I explored the silent cavity with a photographic eye. What an astounding thing is the voice! By what miracle is the hot magma of the earth transformed into that which we call speech? If out of clay such an abstract medium as words can be shaped what is to hinder us from leaving our bodies at will and taking up our abode on other planets or between the planets? What is to prevent us from rearranging all life, atomic, molecular, corporeal, stellar, divine? Why should we stop at words, or at planets, or at divinity? Who or what is powerful enough to eradicate this miraculous leaven which we bear within us like a seed and which, after we have embraced in our mind all the universe, is nothing more than a seed—since to say universe is as easy as to say seed, and we have yet to say greater things, things beyond saying, things limitless and inconceivable, things which no trick of language can encompass. You lying there, I was saying to myself, where has that voice gone? Into what inky crevices are you crawling with your ganglionic feelers? Who are you, what are you now in drugged silence? Are you fish? Are you spongy root? Are you you ? If I should bash your skull in now would all be lost—the music, the narcotic vapors, the glissandos, the rugged parentheses, the priapic snorts, the law of diminishing returns, the pebbles between stutters, the shutters you pull down over naked crimes? If I bore into you now with an awl, here at the temple, will there come out with the blood a single tangible clue?
    In a few minutes we shall be at Nauplia. In a few minutes he will awake with a start, saying “Huh, I must have dozed off.” He always wakes up electrified, as if he were caught committing a crime. He is ashamed to go to sleep. At midnight he is only beginning to feel thoroughly awake. At midnight he goes prowling about in strange quarters looking for someone to talk to. People are collapsing with fatigue: he galvanizes them into attentive listeners. When he is through he pulls out the plug and departs with his vocal apparatus tucked safely away in his diaphragm. He will sit in the dark at a table and stuff himself with bread and olives, with hard-boiled eggs, with herring and cheeses of one sort or another, and while washing it down by his lonesome he will talk to himself, tell himself a story, pat himself on the chest, remind himself to remember