Ecstatic Miller

Then there is Henry Miller the ecstatic. This Miller has no equal in American literature, and few can compare with him in all of world literature. This is the American writer who broke through the parochial grain to seize hold the cask of "new" wine--new only to our soil. It is in fact a very ancient liquor, an intoxicant that was the private stock of Sufi saints and Indian gymnosophists. An elixir that may have been known to the native peoples of this continent, but that died with them after the genocidal contact with the white man. Henry Miller is, in a sense, the ancient and native world's revenge. Embedded in a very particular (and not particularly attractive) time and place, he somehow channeled the spirits that slaughter had set free. Sitting at his desk in his Brooklyn apartment, Miller fired off flares into the night; distress signals that could only be seen and interpreted on an astral plane. And before he knew it--and before the reader of a book such as Tropic of Capricorn can prepare her or himself for it--Henry Miller was surrounded by the ghosts he had summoned in his desperation to make contact, pure unadulterated contact, with whatever lasts, with whatever is meaningful, with whatever lives on unflinchingly in the face of death, and he was lifted up beyond the stratosphere to commune with this cloud of witnesses. When he returned, armed as he was with Promethean fire, or bursting with the stuff that drove Nietzsche's Zarathustra down from the hill, it was certain that he would be marginalized, parodied, and his work tied up in court for decades. It was not the satyric side of Miller that the gods of this world feared and loathed and were determined to suppress--no! That Henry Miller could be easily accommodated. It was instead the Henry Miller who had so clearly liberated himself from their money-murder-madness. The Miller who dared invoke the name of the Gnostic's laughing Christ--the one who stands by the cross watching while his phantom body writhes like a snake on the executioner's spit (the Qur'an, by the way, alludes to this Christ at 4:107-108). Henry Miller the proletarian American Over-soul--that is the man that the authorities have labored to marginalize: shunting his books off into the hands of pornographers and those who have been so blinded by their sex addictions and whatnot that they are incapable of recognizing how, comprehended in his torrent of words, is a raw testament that they, too--could they but see it--they, too, could forsake the shadows to bask in brilliant, life-giving, sunlight...

By placing his work within a particular body of national literature, we tell only a partial truth. Henry Miller wrote an American literature designed to overcome American literature--once and for all. He broke through all conventional boundaries by burrowing deep within. He belongs now to the world and to the ages. America, as anyone who is paying attention has noticed, is finished. The Empire has no clothes. The nation-state is rotten to the core. Miller saw this state of affairs with diamond-like clarity decades before anyone else had the slightest inkling. At the same time, Miller understood something else: he understood that victory over the victors has already been accomplished. The Qur'anic Messiah/Gnostic Christ has been lifted up. The captives need only to recognize the illusory nature of their chains to be set free. Forget power politics. Take hold the weapons of the "weak." Rise up! Rise up! Refuse! Refuse! Refuse!

Tropic of Capricorn

Henry Miller's Tropic of Capricorn from, say, page 267 to page 333 (in the 1961 Grove Press edition)--roughly 56 pages--contains some of the most incandescent prose-poetry in the annals of the English language. In these pages, Miller articulates his "Rosy Crucifixionism"--the Whitmanian vision chewed up and spat out by one who, as he avers on the opening page, has "given up the ghost." If Whitman was Christ, then Miller was Paul (Emerson being the Baptist, if not Enoch or Elijah or the Father of All). And like Paul, Henry Miller does not merely pass along the savior's teachings--oh no! He re-invents them for a new time and place; a new people. Having gone in search of the Whitmanian Republic, he discovered only an "air-conditioned nightmare." To his credit, Miller did not attempt to sugar-coat his findings or to pass them off as something other than they were. There is far more of the Jew in Henry Miller than there is of the Christian--as there is far more of the Jew in Paul than has come down to us in sectarian lore. Miller thunders like a prophet--he fumes and fulminates--but this is only one part of an oeuvre which, when taken as a whole, constitutes a kind of wisdom literature.

Miller on Discovering Dostoevski

From Tropic of Capricorn:

The night I sat down to read Dostoevski for the first time was a most important event in my life, even more important than my first love. It was the first deliberate, conscious act which had significance for me; it changed the whole face of the world. Whether it is true that the clock stopped that moment when I looked up after the first deep gulp I don't know any more. But the world stopped dead for a moment, that I know. It was my first glimpse into the soul of a man, or shall I say simply that Dostoevski was the first man to reveal his soul to me? Maybe I had been a bit queer before that, without realizing it, but from the moment that I dipped into Dostoevski I was definitely, irrevocably, contentedly queer. The ordinary, waking, workaday world was finished for me. Any ambition or desire I had to write was also killed--for a long time to come. I was like those men who have been too long in the trenches, too long under fire. Ordinary human suffering, ordinary human jealousy, ordinary human ambitions--it was just so much shit to me.

The Happy Rock

Re-reading Henry Miller's Tropic of Capricorn after almost three decades... Miller's genius was proletarian; furthermore, it was the genius of a man who, in his writing if not his daily affairs, had never acquired the super-ego, the censor, shame. He was pure, proletarian id. He was Walt Whitman without the ear for a higher calling. Whitman wished to elevate his reader with his Leaves; Henry Miller just pulls one aside and runs at the mouth. And what a mouth! One moment, the wisdom is Heraclitean and profound. The next, the mind-numbing ramblings of a colossal boor. And this seems to me to have been his project: to record everything, to slowly translate himself, word by word, into the symbolic residue of his voice--his genuine Brooklynite voice.

In a way, this had to happen: Whitman had to be followed by one who would sing a song of himself that few could stomach. Of course, he was followed by multitudes with such songs, but Miller's song has remained because, at the end of the day, say what you will, it is artful. Brutally frank, obscene, embarrassing, disgusting, revolting, even--but artful. And he knew it. He knew he had the chops and so he exercised them with wild abandon. And this is what remains: an early 20th century white American proletarian Brooklynite; a man like any other man, only moreso. A man in full. A man revealed from the inside out. A man who would dare to confess himself a man. No more, no less.

Strange as this may sound, his was a remarkable achievement. It took a singleness of purpose and unflinching resolve to tell it all and, at times, to tell it all superbly. If, as Lawrence Durrell argued, "American literature today begins and ends with the meaning of what Miller has done," we are entitled to ask "whither American literature?" For once one particular writer has managed to "get it all down," what remains to be done? Here, perhaps, time may prove itself on a writer's side. For with the passage of time and the consequent shifts of what it means to be an American, it is possible that the task of "getting it all down" is generational. In the wake of Miller, this may be what being a writer in the American grain has come to. Then again, there may be other vistas, other visions, other tasks, as yet unseen. American literature awaits the arrival of its next genius, its next "prophetic figure" of letters in the Emerson-Whitman-Miller line.

Coeur, Instinct, Principes

There are times when it is difficult to stomach some of Pascal's Pensees; and yet, he was a seeker, a sincere one. And for that reason alone I suppose I return to him, again and again. He was at his best when his writing exemplified this threefold motto: Heart, Instincts, Principles--contained in his "Critique de la Raison." Asserting that "C'est le coeur qui sent Dieu et non la raison. Voila ce que c'est que la foi: Dieu sensible au coeur, non a la raison" and, famously, "le coeur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connait point..." Pascal had said all that he needed to say ABOUT religion; but he simply could not check himself. He had to rail, to vilify, to reason most egregiously on behalf of this doctrine or that. But so it is with sectarians: the need to be right, rather than righteous.