Miller, Henry (1891-1980)

Into the Night

1936

"The monarch of the mind is a monkey wrench."

I walk along the ocean front. The sand is strewn with human clams waiting for some one to pry their shells apart. In the roar and hubbub their pissing anguish goes unnoticed. The breakers club them, the lights deafen them, the tide drowns them. They lie behind the pasteboard street in the onyx-colored night and they listen to the hamburgers sizzling. Jabber, jabber, a sneezing and wheezing, balls rolling down the long smooth troughs into tiny holes filles with bric-a-brac, with chinaware and spittoons and flowerpots and stuffed dolls. Greasy Japs wiping rubberplants with wet rags, Armenians chopping onions into microcosmic particles. Macedonians throwing the lasso with molasses arms. Every man, woman, and child in a mackintosh has adenoids, spreads catarrh, diabetes, whooping cough, meningitis. Everything that stands upright, that slides, rolls, tumbles, spins, shoots, teeters, sways and crumbles, is made of nuts and bolts. The monarch of the mind is a monkey wrench. Sovereign pasteboard power.
(p. 160)

Government::Monarch Uncategorized::Monkey Wrench

Reading

"Into the Night," first appeared in New Directions in Prose and Poetry, 1936.

Text from Black Spring (New York: Grove Press, 1963).

06/11/2015