“The great courage is still to gaze as squarely at the light as at death.”
- Albert Camus Introduction It may seem unlikely that the greatest monologue in Western literature begins with the line: “When I look down into this fucked-out cunt of a whore.” But the ensuing pages contain some of the most insightful and ecstatic prose ever written. Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (1934), often cited as a pivotal work of modern sexual liberation, is, equally often, referred to as one of literature’s most infamous examples of misogyny. Both interpretations miss the point. The book, a triumph of vision and authenticity, features a number of coarse erotic scenes, but they are arbitrary in themselves; they are given the same treatment as everything else in Miller´s world: reduced to the bare details and presented candidly in all their voluptuousness and absurdity, all their loveliness, filth and sorrow. D.H. Lawrence believed there were two great modes of life, the religious and the sexual. Miller, however, asserted that “there is only one great way and that is the way of truth [...] I perceive in the lives of the great leaders of mankind a singular and simple concordance of behaviour, an example of truth and wholeness which even a child can grasp.” To this end, what the “Tropics” achieved, in the words of Robert Nye, was an uncompromising drive towards, and on behalf of, truth and simplicity: “a plain-spoken truthfulness, a good-hearted comedy, and a quality of joy discovered somewhere on the far side of despair.” The veracity and exuberance with which Miller was able to dissect and encapsulate (the nature of) human life, makes almost all other prose seem watered-down and insincere by comparison. Ralph Waldo Emerson believed that novels themselves would “give way, by and by, to diaries or autobiographies – captivating books, if only a man knew how to choose among what he calls his experiences that which is really his experience, and how to record truth truly.” Miller himself, in the opening section of Tropic of Cancer, stated that the book was “not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word,” it was, instead, “a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art. The triumph of the individual over art.” And any Art deserving of that capital ‘A’ must not only bear a close resemblance to consciousness, but add something essential to it. While we go idly about our days, within us there is a billion-year-old miracle taking place: the animate earth becoming conscious of itself. This ordinary (yet miraculous) reciprocity is something that is at once beyond us and yet ourselves. It is the exploration of this paradox which, as we will see, makes several of Henry Miller’s books the most thrilling and the most important ever written. I. Sympathy Above all, what Miller stands for, and offers the reader, is a deep fascination with the world. The strange suffering tied up with being in the world does not preclude us from leading an open and ecstatic life, rather it demands it. This is the reprieve, the salvation which allows Miller - in his books as in his life - to tightrope walk across the abyss with a “ferocious gaiety, an unnatural gaiety” - a divine sense of indifference which can only be experienced by one who has first tasted the bitter roots of despair, who has died and been resurrected again, for whom the tragic sense of life has now faded: “Life becomes a spectacle because all values, your own included, are destroyed. Sympathy alone flourishes, but it is not a human sympathy, a limited sympathy […] your interest, your curiosity develops at an outrageous pace […] there is no fundamental, unalterable difference between things: all is flux, all is perishable […] One thing is certain, that when you die and are resurrected you belong to the earth and whatever is of the earth is yours inalienably. You become an anomaly of nature, a being without shadow; you will never die again but only pass away like the phenomena about you.” Those privileged moments, when a sense of this cosmological desolation takes our place, have tormented and infatuated artists for centuries: those moments when time suddenly, sublimely slips, when you see a certain place as place itself. In such moments there is a mood of calm anxiety, in which we almost view the world from an objective standpoint, as in The Outsider or L'Nausea. We get a sense of the life-world stripped of all our perceptions and thoughts about it; of that state which Martin Heidegger called the thrownness (Geworfenheit) of our being-in-the-world. For those few timeless moments we are not ourselves, but the earth becoming conscious of itself, singing itself into existence. What Miller referred to as Sympathy, Heidegger referred to as Care. Both concepts involve a sense of an intimate (though not sentimental) concern for the world, for the singular existence we find ourselves thrown into, and for our authentic involvement in, and awareness of, the particular mode of consciousness to which our species happens to belong. II. The Fecundity of Words The only books worth the paper they’re printed on are those which, in the words of Kafka, serve as “an axe for the frozen sea within us.” It is only worth sitting down to write if you intend to, in some form or other, give a sense of those incommunicable truths that render, with a human hand, the infinite ache that exists in the human heart; to ascend to those lofty arid planes where, in our solitude, we can exist outside of time and space and somehow find ourselves renewed in this world: “I didn't dare to think of anything then except the "facts." To get beneath the facts I would have had to be an artist, and one doesn't become an artist overnight. First you have to be crushed, to have your conflicting points of view annihilated. You have to be wiped out as a human being in order to be born again an individual. You have to be carbonized and mineralized in order to work upwards from the last common denominator of the self. You have to get beyond pity in order to feel from the very roots of your being. One can't make a new heaven and earth with "facts". There are no "facts" - there is only the fact that man, every man everywhere in the world, is on his way to ordination. Some men take the long route and some take the short route. Every man is working out his own destiny in his own way and nobody can be of help except by being kind, generous and patient.” Every line in Tropic of Capricorn (1939) is a clenched fist, gripping the warm entrails of early twentieth century America. In terms of both style and insight - in his portrayal of diurnal American life, his descriptions of people and the texture of our experience of consciousness - no surrealist writer comes close to Miller; not Apollinaire or Burroughs, not Rimbaud or Breton. And, unlike Bellow or Kerouac, every line is vital; emblems not only of the strange beauty and desolation of New York in the twenties - where there was “a music of such sullen despair and bankruptcy as to make the flesh shrivel” - or Paris in the thirties - which like a whore from a distance “seems ravishing, you can't wait until you have her in your arms. And five minutes later you feel empty, disgusted with yourself” - but the fruitless desperation with which men and women go about their daily lives in a “huge tomb in which men struggle to earn a decent death.” Just as Wordsworth, Whitman and The Beats in their respective generations moved poetry toward a more natural language, so Henry Miller did for prose in his. III. Eroticism At the heart of the “Tropics” are humankind’s two essential struggles: against hunger and against insanity. The core of Miller’s message was not sexual expression per se, but throwing off society’s shackles to allow individual autonomy to flourish. He was neither misanthropic nor nihilistic, but filled with pity and despair, faced with the cancer that was turning 1930’s America into a wasteland, an industrialised cesspool devoid of moral purpose or joy. The erotic scenes portray the deepest male passion in all its beauty, lust and depravity. When dealing with such a subject no detail should remain veiled - neither the microscopic hairs around the soft rim of the cunt, nor that moment when ecstasy and oblivion, the male and female, inexpressively disappear into one another. It is that moment - when you start to sense the softness of her thighs and the warmth of her body beside you under the sheets, when she begins to writhe with ecstasy and her dreamy moans reach into you, as you disappear into the oblivion of each other's arms - it is that moment that Miller wishes to distil the whole romantic drama down to. The form of love described in Miller’s books comprises a frenzy of neuroses and epiphanies. It examines the minutiae of the erotic in all its crazy joy. But it also, by Miller’s own admission, represents an interminable sorrow: “Going back in a flash over the women I've known. It's like a chain which I've forged out of my own misery.” But the portrayal of women in the books (often they are reduced to little more than depersonalised sex organs) is not misogynistic. Miller is misogynistic. His descriptions of women are an attempt to communicate his own incompleteness and his inability to empathise with others, not to justify his lecherousness. As Norman Mailer pointed out, Miller set out to explore not the world, but himself: “which meant that one followed the line of one’s sexual impulse without a backward look at what was moral.” The erotic scenes are not intended to be titillating, but confrontational. He reduced the women with which he was intimate in the same way he reduced all the characters in his books. Miller believed that the obscene in literature “has nothing to do with sexual excitation, as in pornography. If there is an ulterior motive at work it is one which goes far beyond sex. Its purpose is to awaken, to usher in a sense of reality.” When justifying the distribution of his “rosy crucifixion trilogy” to the Norwegian courts in 1957, he stated that: “if there is anything that deserves to be called ‘obscene’ it is this oblique, glancing confrontation with the mysteries, this walking up to the edge of the abyss, enjoying all the ecstasies of vertigo and yet refusing to yield to the spell of the unknown.” Miller believed in absolute freedom of expression and aimed merely to relate his experiences “as honestly and faithfully as possible. In short, to expose the whole man and thus, obliquely, the society which fostered him.” In both his life and writing, Miller was constantly seeking to align himself with the world, with the underlying cosmic flux which exists within, and without, each of us. He did this not through despair or faith, but through courage and directness of speech. This did not, of course, involve concerning himself only with the more sordid aspects of love, but did mean not eschewing them either. A glimpse of his more tender side, in a letter to his then-partner, Anaïs Nin: “Anaïs, I don't know how to tell you what I feel. I live in perpetual expectancy. You come and the time slips away in a dream. It is only when you go that I realize completely your presence. And then it is too late. You numb me.” In Miller’s writings about love, amid the trivialities and eroticism, as in real love, there are also moments of heart-rending poignancy: “She rises up out of a sea of faces and embraces me, embraces me passionately - a thousand eyes, noses, fingers, legs, bottles, windows, purses, saucers, all glaring up at us and we in each other’s arms oblivious. I sit down beside her and she talks – a flood of talk. Wild consumptive notes of hysteria, perversion, leprosy. I hear not a word because she is beautiful and I love her and now I am happy and willing to die.” And later: “Smoke coming up between our legs, the tracks creaking, semaphores in our blood. I feel her body close to mine – all mine now – and I stop to rub my hands over the warm velvet. Everything around us is crumbling, crumbling and the warm body under the warm velvet is aching for me.” And even Nabokov would have been proud of: “Her words falling like pollen through a fog.” But my personal favourite is: “We breathe warmly into each other’s mouth. Close together, America three thousand miles away. I never want to see it again. To have her here in bed with me, breathing on me, her hair in my mouth – I count that as something of a miracle.” “My world of human beings had perished; I was utterly alone in the world and for friends I had the streets, and the streets spoke to me in that sad, bitter language compounded of human misery, yearning, regret, failure, wasted effort […] Mona clung to me and with a quivering voice begged me to promise that I would never leave her, never, no matter what happened. And, only a few days later, I stood on the platform of the Gare St. Lazare and I watched the train pull out, the train that was bearing her away: she was leaning out of the window, just as she had leaned out of the window when I left her in New York, and there was that same, sad, inscrutable smile on her face, that last-minute look which is intended to convey so much, but which is only a mask that is twisted by a vacant smile. Only a few days before, she had clung to me desperately and then something happened, something which is not even clear to me now, and of her own volition she boarded the train and she was looking at me again with that sad, enigmatic smile which baffles me, which is unjust, unnatural, which I distrust with all my soul. And now it is I, standing in the shadow of the viaduct, who reach out for her who cling to her desperately and there is that same inexplicable smile on my lips, the mask that I have clamped down over my grief. I can stand here and smile vacantly, and no matter how fervid my prayers, no matter how desperate my longing, there is an ocean between us; there she will stay and starve, and here I shall walk from one street to the next, the hot tears scalding my face.” IV. The Faculty of Imagination For Miller, of far greater importance than literature or knowledge, than love or religion, were truth and salvation: Truth in a metaphysical sense - our comprehension of the infinite nature of the universe, the nature of logic; and salvation in a moral sense - how I should conduct myself in the world, asking not merely what I might want out of life, but what the world might require from me. For any serious writer, truth will bleed as ink, as through blood; for the two realms – the written and the spoken – occupy the same ground in our dialectical experience of the world. Miller recognises that we too often lead ordinary lives, but not simple ones. If we were to simply open up and become more honest with ourselves, the truths about the world would show themselves effortlessly: “Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. There is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.” V. Looking East Underlying Miller’s pursuit of truth and reality is the Borgesian idea that life is somehow being dreamt elsewhere. The dreamer is himself the dreamed one. Borges, in a passage reminiscent of the Tao Te Ching, frames the paradox thusly: “Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river... it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.” Novalis, in similar fashion, asserted that: “Nobody knows himself, if he is only himself and not also another one at the same time.” Miller sought always to be “standing in my own presence”; he wished for “the act to be a manifestation of life”; and believed that we were seeking through love to unite ourselves with ourselves. He recognised that, ultimately, the Artist “has to make himself a part of the mystery, live in it as well as with it. Acceptance is the solution: it is an art, not an egotistical performance on the part of the intellect.” Miller doesn’t waste a single breath trying to sound literary. The “Tropics” are not books in the normal sense: they are thrilling human documents - the cries of a man ripping out his bowels dancing over your dead corpse, wrapping handfuls of entrails in sheets of newspaper and handing them to you with a grin. They comprise a hymn of desolation; a cry not from Miller’s own heart, or mouth, but from the bowels of the earth itself. As Miller described his hero Dostoyevsky in Tropic of Cancer, so we could describe Miller himself: “It is a pity that we shall never again have the opportunity to see a man placed at the very core of the mystery and, by his flashes, illuminating for us the depth and immensity of the darkness.” In the same way that a woman’s beauty is less important than the abandon with which she amerces herself in the act of making love, so too the literary talent of the likes of Bukowski, Kerouac and Miller is insignificant compared with the scope of their vision and depth of their thirst. They burnt completely, with a white inner flame, while the other literary embers merely flicker in the breeze: “The worst sin that can be committed against the artist is to take him at his word, to see in his work a fulfilment instead of a horizon.” Miller knew what it was to be fully awake to everything around him, and packed every line with the density of that vision, that contagious fascination with the source of life and the strange beauty of all its manifestations, of that billion-year-old silence that, at this very moment, is growing older by the second. Everything moved towards, and on behalf of, that silent little miracle: the voluptuousness of the looking itself. Contrary to some superficial readings of Miller’s work, his emphasis is on the mysterious value of ordinary life, not its futility. Early on, Miller discovered that what he had desired all his life “was not to live - if what others are doing is called living - but to express myself.” Like Wallace Stevens, the only thing of interest was interpreting that which is “beyond us, yet ourselves”; that substance, or reality, which runs parallel to life and is also contained within it and which likewise, in the words of Miller: “flows through the subterranean vaults of the flesh.” This paradox is the reason why, after reading Tropic of Cancer, all other books feel watered down, missing the point: there are very few things worth expounding for hundreds of pages that can’t be said in a few lines. But such is the ebullience and torrential nature of Miller’s language that he pulls you along, despite the contradiction at the heart of his vast hymn to the futility of language: “The great joy of the artist is to become aware of a higher order of things, to recognise by the compulsive and spontaneous manipulation of his own impulses the resemblance between human creation and what is called divine creation.” Like his literary idol, Blaise Cendrars, spontaneity, boundless curiosity and immersion in actualities were the hallmarks both of his life and art. Despite not formally delving into eastern spiritual practices, his thinking often exhibits similarities with Buddhist and Taoist thought: “Contrasting reactions seem to combine or merge, producing that ultimate one, the great catalyser called realisation.” The image of the Himalayan monk and meditative sage constantly appear in Miller’s writing, often at the pinnacle of his monologues when he is no longer able to express the inexpressible and returns to the body, to the world itself, to the final purpose of simple awareness: “To be caught in a glut of dramatic episodes, to be ceaselessly participating, means among other things that one is unaware of the outlines of that bigger drama of which human activity is but a small part. The act of writing puts a stop to one kind of activity in order to release another. When a monk, prayerfully meditating, walks slowly and silently down the hall of a temple, and thus walking sets in motion one prayer wheel after another, he gives a living illustration of the act of sitting down to write. The mind of the writer, no longer preoccupied with observing and knowing, wanders meditatively amidst a world of forms which are set spinning by the mere brush of his wings.” Truth has no centre-point. It can be found everywhere. A poet’s search for truth is an illusory voyage, as there is no single revelation waiting to be discovered: “One's destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” Instead of objective truth, we find a true way of looking at things, a true way of being that we find was always already there within. Whether the object is a collar button, a puddle on the street, or an arresting expression on a stranger’s face, the act of attention is what brings us closer to reality at every step, closer to the hunger and fascination born out of the innate curiosity of the human mind: “The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnified world in itself. Almost an "unrecognisable" world. The writer waits in ambush for these unique moments. He pounces on his little grain of nothingness like a beast of prey. It is the moment of full awakening, of union and absorption, and it can never be forced. Sometimes one makes the mistake or commits the sin, shall I say, of trying to fix the moment, trying to pin it down in words. It took me ages to understand why, after having made exhaustive efforts to induce these moments of exaltation and release, I should be so incapable of recording them. I never dreamed that it was an end in itself, that to experience a moment of pure bliss, of pure awareness, was the end-all and be-all.” For Miller, the whole struggle was to “squeeze into the public record some tiny essence of the perpetual inner melody”. His feelings on art, to some extent, echo the Buddhist idea that Right Thought is the foundation of truth. In his life, Miller’s actions were questionable to many, including himself. But his ideas, his voice, were always deliberate, and in step with the greater aim of attention to reality, realisation and, ultimately, therefore, salvation. Miller was a man intoxicated with the splendour and magnificence of life. He believed that, in order to efface death, one must not only live well, but live and speak with pointed intent: “a word spoken with the whole being can give life. Activity in itself means nothing; it is often a sign of death […] This keeping oneself alive, out of a blind urge to defeat death, is itself a means of sowing death.” We lack the courage of our convictions. Writers often swallow the bravery to act and replace it with words: “No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in. His inspiration is deflected at the source [...] Why does he put millions of words between himself and the reality of the world? Why does he defer action?” Miller, like Andre Gide, was a staunch advocate of following one’s own bent, as long as it led upwards. In Miller’s work as well as near superhuman intentions of grandeur and self-discovery, there is a lingering sense of a man trying to prove something, to both himself and the world; a man trying to justify himself and his path. There is a sense that, through his writing, he is engaging in a prolonged catharsis whereby he is simultaneously admonishing himself of blame and flagellating himself for his failures: “Why do we not give in all directions at once? What is it we fear? We fear to lose ourselves. And yet, until we do lose ourselves there can be no hope of finding ourselves. We are the world, and to enter fully into the world, we must first abandon it. It doesn't matter what road we take so long as we are giving of ourselves, so long as we are not holding on.” All good prose writing must (either directly or indirectly) reflect the experience of consciousness. As Miller does this, he lifts you up so close to the infinite you feel vertigo; and pulls you back in, so close to the very fibre of being that you start to sense the coldness of your own bones. The literary task Miller set for himself was nothing short of monumental. The Supreme Fiction, a term coined by American poet Wallace Stevens, removes the writer from literary traditions, lifts him out of history. He stands, instead, face to face with the faculty of the imagination itself, with the atavistic forces which unite our capacity for thought with the infinite nature of things, out of which consciousness first crept: “Of what use the poems of death, the maxims and counsels of the sage ones, the codes and tablets the law-givers, of what use leaders, thinkers, men of art, if the very elements that made up the fabric of life were incapable of being transformed?” The Supreme Fiction is a reality we arrive at not via the gaunt world of reason, but sensation and imagination stripped bare. And if Miller’s writing seems to be at times indulgent or perverse, it is in part because we recognise in the oblivion of despair the true voluptuousness of being alive; we find in indifference the beginnings of virtue; and in the groaning of the world we sometimes detect the sound of angelic voices rising above the din: “I wanted something of the earth that was not of man’s doing, something absolutely divorced from the human of which I was surfeited. I wanted something purely terrestrial and absolutely divested of idea. I wanted to feel the blood running back into my veins.” Miller’s work is so enthralling and fecund because it fuses our everyday afflictions and speech and goings-on with the most profound and poignant mysteries of human existence. To quote Stevens, we are brought face to face with “nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” Miller’s language undulates effortlessly between the profound and the profane, as language should. It is the sordid speech of a sailor, drunk on shore leave, telling tales of his lecherous encounters, recounting and exaggerating every detail. It is, at the very same time, the divine language of the senses, that manages to carry us to the shorelines of a far-off dream, to that strange silent place at the edge of consciousness, where we are reminded that we belong to the earth and that we are not separate beings and, as Stevens wrote in his poem Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour: “It is in that thought that we collect ourselves, Out of all the indifferences, into one thing”[…] Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves. We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,[…] In which being there together is enough.” What you get with Miller is good honest storytelling; insightful human reflection. There are more quotable lines on a single page than in most of the so-called classics. Taking a page at random: “only the lash of hunger could stir them” and “when I was alone, when I wasn’t obliged to listen, I shrank to the size of a pinpoint” and “walking with O’Rouke and hearing nothing but theft, arson, rape, homicide was like listening to a little motif out of a grand symphony. And just as one can whistle an air of Bach and be thinking of a woman he wants to sleep with, so, listening to O’Rouke, I would be thinking of the moment he would stop talking and say “what’ll you have to eat?”” VI. The Air-conditioned Nightmare In what many consider to be Miller’s (last) great work, The Colossus of Maroussi (1941), the author describes the Greek poet and raconteur George Katsimbalis as a man who could “galvanize the dead with his talk. It was a sort of devouring process when he described a place he ate into it, like a goat attacking a carpet. If he described a person he ate him alive from head to toe. If it were an event he would devour every detail, like an army of white ants descending upon a forest.” This is a description that perfectly fits Miller himself, whose own monologues and orations were as ravenous and they were astute. He is a hungry man in every sense, and every sense is hungry. When he gets going he has no equal. The details of the Paris streets, or those of the naked universe, of his rotting human soul, of New York in the winter, they are all laid bare and lit up like a sea of Roman candles going off at once. William H. Gass, writing in the New York Times in 1976, observed that “there is an eager vitality and exuberance to the writing which is exhilarating; a rush of spirit into the world as though all the sparkling wines had been uncorked at once… beneath all the quiet ruminations of the mind, the slendered sensibilities, the measured lyricism of finer feelings, even nearby the remotest precincts of being, is a psyche like quicksand, an omnivorous animals, the continually chetving self.” Gass’s favourite passage from Tropic of Cancer is worth quoting in full: “And down this corridor, swinging his distress like a dingy lantern, Van Norden staggers, staggers in and out as here and there a door opens and a hand yanks him in or a hoof pushes him out. And the further off he wanders the more lugubrious is his distress; he wears it like a lantern which the cyclists hold between their teeth on a night when the pavement is wet and slippery in and out of the dingy rooms he wanders, and when he sits down the chair collapses, when he opens his valise there is only a toothbrush inside in every room there is a mirror before which he stands attentively and chews his rage, and from the constant chewing, from the grumbling and mumbling and the muttering and cursing his jaws have gotten unhinged and they sag badly and, when he rubs his beard, pieces of his jaw crumble away and he's so disgusted with himself that he stamps on his own jaw, grinds it to bits with his big heels.” In the city, Miller observed that “no stone was laid upon another with love or reverence; no street was aid for dance or joy. One thing has been added to another in a mad scramble to fill the belly… The streets smell of a hunger that has nothing to do with love; they smell of the belly which is insatiable and of the creations of the empty belly which are null and void.” […] “At the opera, the music makes no sense; here in the street it has just the right demented touch to give it poignancy” VII. Anarchism In his book On Henry Miller, the Scottish writer Jon Burnside explores the idea that Henry Miller was not a pornographer, but a veritable prophet. He shows us how Miller’s anarchist sensibilities (in a spiritual, rather than a political sense) help us escape the “air-conditioned nightmare” of the modern world. Burnside sees Miller as a sage in the Taoist sense of the word “not good, not venerable, not saintly, but wise to the world and to himself.” Miller himself was aware his place in the scheme of things: “it doesn't matter whether the world is right or wrong, good or bad. It is - and that suffices. The world is what it is and I am what I am. I say it not like a squatting Buddha with legs crossed, but out of a gay, hard wisdom.” The question which underlies Burnside’s enquiry – a question which constantly lurks just under the surface of all Miller’s writing, and arguably all serious writing – is whether books can help us live more rewarding lives. For Miller the answer is clear. Art teaches us nothing less than the significance of life itself and enables us to align ourselves with the greater order of things: “Through art then, one finally establishes contact with reality: that is the great discovery. Here all is play and invention; there is no solid foothold from which to launch the projectiles which will pierce the miasma of folly, ignorance and greed. The world has not to be put in order: the world is order incarnate. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order.” Although Miller’s anarchistic tendencies, according to Burnside, were more spiritual than social, they are informed by the state of "civilized” Western society. Miller, as we have seen, was not misanthropic - but he was baffled by, and fiercely opposed to, the idea that people had so readily accepted the new world order and blindly followed a trajectory that was eroding one´s individual instincts and the very rhythms of existence. Miller would have firmly agreed with Freud’s claim, in The Future of an Illusion, that: “It goes without saying that a civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence.” Since our civilisation was in fact persisting, despite the fact that the majority of its citizens were dissatisfied, Miller indeed sought revolt. This revolt took place not in the streets, but in one’s own psyche, one’s own experience of freedom, one’s own progress as a human being. Like Freud, Miller was aware that this freedom could not merely comprise egoistic hedonism under a different banner. Rather, it must entail a level of responsibility which most people were unwilling or unable to accept. Freud, in Civilisation and its Discontents, wrote that most people didn’t in fact want freedom “because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.” Despite being a staunch critic of the modern West ways, Miller believed that society itself could not ultimately be held to blame for our disillusionment, rather that “we have enslaved ourselves, by our own petty, circumscribed view of life.” He was striving to go beyond the desire for an illusory freedom of the ego, to go beyond the kind of liberty that “does not take into account other people’s differences, only one’s own.” To find salvation, Miller believed, one must arrive at, and then surrender, this illusory freedom, for “it will never aid one to find one’s link, one’s communion, with all mankind.” Had Miller taken his critical enquiries to their logical conclusion, he would have arrived at the philosophical discipline of Phenomenology. Formulated by Edmund Husserl in the early twentieth century, Phenomenology sought to reorientate our direct experience of consciousness and reinstate it as our basis for truth in the world. Husserl’s early formulation of Phenomenology received criticism for being solipsistic. He responded by asserting the intersubjectivity of the world, thereby showing that one’s own experience incorporated the idea that the world was perceived by other subjects and not only one’s own personal perspective. Miller’s ideas coincide with those of Husserl’s successor Merleau-Ponty, who asserted that the body itself was the true subject of experience and, as an extension of this, showed the Earth to be the forgotten basis of our awareness as conscious sentient beings. The boundaries of a living body are not closed or determinate. My life and the world’s life are deeply intertwined. The landscape as I directly experience it is hardly a determinate object; it is an ambiguous realm that responds to my emotions and calls forth feelings from me in turn. Without the body, without the senses, there would be no contact with the world, no awareness, no mind. By asserting the physical basis of our place in the world, Merleau-Ponty rejuvenated our sense of wonder at the fathomless things and highlighted the importance of the primordial rhythms that underlie and define our existence. Miller, likewise, was concerned with the primacy of the body and its direct connection to the primordial forces that underpin conscious experience (and the way we perceive it). Like Merleau-Ponty he believed that “ideas cannot exist alone in the vacuum of the mind.” There are certain things that can be taught in no other way than through silence. And so we arrive not at the centre of some distant truth, but back at our own mute contact with things and, as T.S. Eliot said, know that place for the first time. Like Husserl, Miller he was interested in moving beyond the illusory form of freedom whereby one is free only to please one’s own ego, and instead towards a new way of seeing, towards complete intersubjective immersion in the life-world (Lebenswelt) that precedes, limits and defines knowledge, of which knowledge always speaks, as we live it, prior to all our thoughts about it. Our everyday existence is characterised by complete immersion in the ways of the world. The world fascinates us and our lives are completely caught up in its rhythms and activities. This intersubjective freedom was, for Miller, fraught with the highest significance. It meant establishing “the ultimate difference of his own peculiar being and in doing so discover his kinship with all humanity”. It involved acceptance, but not conformity, and began with the primacy of the individual and the Flesh: “The body, which was once the temple, has become a living tomb. The body has lost its relationship with the world in which it moves.” One returns to the body-subject as a starting point, that underlying mode of perception that is always already there, beneath all cultural or personal acquisitions, whenever we choose to quietly observe it. It persists (only) without our being particularly conscious of our perceptions about it, but by allowing what underlies them to merge with the act of looking and, for those few sublime moments, before we inevitably forfeit our direct presence therein, we almost return to the very basis of freedom, like Camus’ “man lifted from himself, inscribed for a brief moment in the continuance of the world.” In The Colossus of Maroussi Miller wrote that “there is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy.” Salvation, on the other hand, a concept which was central to Miller’s literary raison d’etre is arrived at by what he called a “sublime indifference”: “To keep the mind empty is a feat, a very healthful feat too. To be silent the whole day long, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely lazy, thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world is the finest medicine a man can give himself. The book-learning gradually dribbles away; problems melt and dissolve; ties are gently severed; thinking, when you deign to indulge in it, becomes very primitive; the body becomes a new and wonderful instrument; you look at plants or stones or fish with different eyes; you wonder what people are struggling to accomplish with their frenzied activities.” Ecologist and Philosopher David Abram cites our loss of reciprocity with the animate earth as a key factor in our loss of humanity. He asserts that “we are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.” Miller was fond of railing against modern Western society, but rarely posited a viable alternative in any kind of specific terms. Although his ideals were seductive and full of wisdom (“what are we here for if not to enjoy life eternal, solve what problems we can, give light, peace and joy to our fellow-man, and leave this dear fucked-up planet a little healthier than when we were born”) they lacked any real practical substance, in either philosophical or moral terms. Miller would have been fond of Abram’s blend of Ecology and Phenomenology as it calls for a renewal of our awareness as body-subjects and also decries the dissonance imposed on us by technological ubiquity. This loss of contact takes place on two closely-related levels: the physical and the sensorial. For Abram, not only has “civilized” human culture cut itself off from the Earth itself, but actually exhibits a profound perceptual problem. Humanity does not perceive surrounding nature in a clear manner. This leads to a reduction of non-human species (and the earth itself) to mere objects and contributes to our senses relinquishing the power of the Other, “the vision that for so long had motivated our most sacred rituals, our dances, and our prayers.” The body and the senses, the ecstasy of experience itself, play a vital role in Miller’s life and oeuvre. He would have been sympathetic towards the views of the Phenomenologists and their modern Ecological disciples such as Abram, who sought an extension (or, rather, return) of consciousness to involve the non-human world. To quote Abram: “The human mind is not some otherworldly essence that comes to house itself inside our physiology. Rather it is instilled and provoked by the sensorial field itself, induced by the tensions and participations between the human body and the animate earth […] By acknowledging such links between the inner, psychological world and the perceptual terrain that surrounds us, we begin to turn inside-out, loosening the psyche from its confinement within a strictly human sphere, freeing sentience to return to the sensible world that contains us. Miller wanted to fill his books with this fluid realm of direct experience, which had come to be seen in the West as a mere consequence of events unfolding in the more “real” world of quantifiable and measurable scientific facts. Miller was drawn to the “fluid” nature of experience and indeed all that flowed: “The great incestuous wish is to flow on, one with time, to merge the great image of the beyond, with the here and now. A fatuous suicidal wish that is constipated by words and paralysed by thought.” Miller, ultimately, sought a way-of-being that encompassed these ideas, the primacy of the body, ecstasy, (the conveying of) direct experience, individual freedom, sublime indifference, and the progress of a society that actively seeks to promote these ideals. As Burnside pointed out, like the Phenomenologists and the Taoists, Miller always came back to the centrality of acceptance and at-homeness in the world: “The earth is not a lair, neither is it a prison. The earth is a Paradise, the only one we'll ever know. We will realize it the moment we open our eyes. We don't have to make it a Paradise - it is one. We have only to make ourselves fit to inhabit it.” But Miller was torn. He was split between the simplicity of the Taoist monk in quiet contemplation, silently seeking to become the very path he traversed, and the Dionysian ecstasy of boundless crazy joy: “Let us have a world of men and women with dynamos between their legs, a world of natural fury, of passion, action, drama, madness, a world that produces ecstasy and not dry farts.” For the most part we live neither simple nor ecstatic lives, but ordinary ones. We inhabit a world of old ladies dying in hairdressers, of china-cup-gossip, where we sleepwalk through even those moments that are supposed to be reserved for the greatest joy, as though we are idle spectators of our own lives, of life itself: “To live out one's desire, is, it seems to me, the great purpose of living. But desire is paramount and ineradicable, even when, according to Buddhist thought, it passes over into the opposite.” So Miller revered not only the Himalayan sage, but equally the edacious French, who had mastered the art of living in a different way: “They know how to enjoy an aperitif and they don’t worry if the houses are unpainted”... There he would find himself “in a world so natural, so complete, that I am lost “ … “the whole run of flesh, from hair to nails, expresses the miracle of breathing, as if the inner eye, in its thirst for greater reality, had converted the pores of the flesh into hungry seeing mouths”... with a single paragraph he is able to, like he said of Matiesse, remove the “ugly scaffold to which the body of man is chained by the incontrovertible facts of life”... “he has the courage to sacrifice a harmonious line in order to detect the rhythm and murmur of the blood.“ This is a man seeking the middle way. Imploring us to reconnect with our senses, rather than remain slaves to their whims. For, in the West, according to Miller’s lover Anais Nin, it is the image we seek to possess “not the texture, the living warmth, the human closeness.” VIII. The Word Made Flesh As we have seen, throughout Miller’s work, as in literature itself, there is a lingering doubt as to whether Art can ever truly bring us closer to life, or even sufficiently reflect direct experience in the same way that we perceive it. The latter question seems to be one of aesthetics rather than epistemology. But the former question has a significant bearing on the moral value of Art. Most artists would surely agree with Miller that “the art of living involves the act of creation.” But this preliminary contention gives precedence to a more important assertion: “The work of art is nothing. It is only the tangible, visible evidence of a way of life... for the artist to attach himself to his work, or identify himself with it, is suicidal.” In other words, one’s aesthetic creations, no matter how closer linked to life, are secondary to one’s actual way of life: “An artist should be able not only to spit on his predecessor's art, or on all works of art, but on his own too. He should be able to be an artist all the time, and finally not be an artist, but a piece of art.” Miller consciously attempted to avoid being “literary” in favour of recording the bare facts of life and people’s lives and turn our thoughts back to the immediate and personal elements of our own lives: “The aim and purpose was to open up life, to make man hungry for life, to exalt life - and to refer all questions back to life.” Bertrand Russell encouraged us to follow the same path: “Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life.” Camus too: “In a world whose absurdity appears to be so impenetrable, we simply must reach a greater degree of understanding among men, a greater sincerity.” One wonders whether Miller was trying to render humanity a service or just attract attention to, and justify, himself. According to those who knew him, he was a very warm, but self-obsessed man. That said, as a champion of the human, in the sense of man’s capacity to transcend his own condition, he is to be revered. When it comes to the big questions, we may prefer to stick with Lao Tzu or the Buddha, who were less verbose and more to the point and emphasised simplicity, patience and compassion instead of Pernod, cunt and mortality But if, like me, you value the ecstasy and intimacy of Miller’s insightful, perverse, cosmological prose, you’ll find yourself re-reading his books again and again because, afterwards, everything else seems watered-down and sterile by comparison - and, worst of all, human.
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AuthorEnglish teacher from the UK. Living in Granada. Currently working in Doha. Archives
February 2022
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