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!