By Henry Miller
Date: 31 March 1998

sun without aspect

In the dark, locked away in the black hole with no world looking on, no
adversary, no rivals, the blinding dynamism of the will slowed down a bit,
gave her a molten copperish glow, the words coming out of her mouth like
lava, her flesh clutching ravenously for a hold, a perch on something solid
and substantial, something in which to reintegrate and repose for a few
moments. It was like a frantic long-distance message, an SOS from a sinking
ship. At first I mistook it for passion, for the ecstasy produced by flesh
rubbing against flesh. I thought I had found a living volcano, a female
Vesuvius. I never thought of a human ship going down in an ocean of 
despair, in a Sargasso of impotence. Now I think of that black star 
gleaming through the hole in the ceiling, that fixed star which hung above
our conjugal cell, more fixed, more remote than the Absolute, and I know
it was her, emptied of all that was properly herself: a dead black sun
without aspect.