Henry Miller and the Life Abundant
24 February 2007
This is the first of at least a two part series, for I find it impossible to summon the spirit of this man without an excess of ebullience. Henry Miller is alive! and he speaks to me! My intentions for this first installment are songs of praise and the ever steady relevancy and necessity of Henry Valentine Miller. The second phase will be all but a devotional to Miller’s book, The Colossus of Maroussi, a colossal work if there ever was one.
You are a fish in the ocean of time, you are a constant in an ocean of change, you are nothing and everything at one and the same time. The Immortality of Mortality from Stand Still Like a Hummingbird
Henry Valentine Miller. The name, the man and the writer have managed to sear themselves into me so completely that if ever the need arose for extraction there would ensue an arduous and painful production. Thankfully, that need will never arise. Though writing this will be similar for sometimes, when reaching heights of passion, I believe he has given to me all. Can it be coincidental that my birth was the advent to his death? As I wailed bloody from the womb, he lay on peaceful wings coasting over the sunset of a life well lived. There were twenty-four hours for an ephemeral communion of spirits and that was the only time I shared with him on earth. On more grounded terms, I once picked up his book by recommendation of a friend and have yet to set them down. As he writes in The Books of My Life:
A book lives through the passionate recommendation of one reader to another. Nothing can throttle this basic impulse in the human being. Despite the views of cynics and misanthropes, it is my belief that men will always strive to share their deepest experiences.
The ‘deepest experience’ which he mentions in passing and reverts back to as the book winds along, is formulated as any tangible experience is, as ‘an event in ones life.’ Miller writes of Oswald Spengler and the impact of his revelatory impulses and I write of Miller, his impact on me. (Though I have tried and failed at Spengler, I am not deterred.) Henry Miller came to me during the most spectral upheaval incurred in my life so far, not as guide, as one may be inclined to believe, but as an illumination, a swaying lamp ever ready to procure for me the joyous and the wondrous, the destroyed and the destructible. He allowed me to prove to myself that heights afore time dreamed of were obtainable, he brought me closer to the depths of my soul and that great grisly being I dared to call self. La-la-la! Listen, for this is a song of praise! He came to me as I received premonitions of I the author. He spurred me on. He proved to me divinity was obtainable through art and as humans, that is our one true goal.
It is Henry Miller’s honesty that we, as individuals, are in desperate need of. He stands naked, in blatant refusal to shroud himself in even a sheet. He stands before us, the prophet on the mountaintop, screaming with all his might, so that those who are doomed may eventually be freed. He wails so that we may become closer to ourselves, honestly. “Above all, we should cease postponing the act of becoming what in fact and essence we are.” (from Plexus) What though is our honest naked self? Stripped of all influences of society, ransacked of all prefabricated ideals, pulled down into the dust as a serpent on its belly. ‘Becoming what in fact and essence we are.’ Repeat that. Repeat it again. Say it as many times is necessary to get it through your thick skull. For there is no pure saint and no pure devil. If you think yourself to be a soldier embarked on a mission to save the earth, think again and this time think honestly. With one foot stuck in the muck of degradation, the other hovered over the pristine glass of almighty benefactor, you have two feet all the same. Now think about it, honestly.
To admit to ourselves our baseness, to revel in it for some moments and to remember what those moments consist of is essential. It is the cancer bred by humans that will be the destruction of the world. Why fight it? You have already been inexorably weaved into it. For America our cancer is our ideals, it is our suburbia devouring forest and field, it is our convenience, which has become a lustful desire the whole world round, our supermarkets and our petrol guzzling frenzy, our quest in the name of humanity to undo, which is laden with equable weight. Why not stop and forget about it all? Why not run to the hills to converse with the magnanimity flowing through every living thing as you listen patiently to the universality rustling through the tall pine boughs as they stretch forever upward? Then decide. Honestly.
Turmoil and chaos are the keystone around which the earlier Tropics pivot. Henry Miller, in determination to leave a scar on the world did so by first revealing humans for what they are. His scenes of obscenity were employed as tools to grab the readers attention, to shake the reader out of a confounded belief, to jar the reader so completely, so that they have no choice but to listen. I believe all must listen closely to the astounding poetics and prophecies of this wise man. There has remained a relevancy for Henry Miller since the earth itself was created. The beginning of logical time does not stretch so far into the past, we must remain connected to the primeval beings we once were and continue to be. Foraging along the forest floor, we all sing songs of harmony. La-la-la! There I go again.
The task of genius, and man is nothing if not genius, is to keep the miracle alive, to live always in the miracle, to make the miracle more and more miraculous, to swear allegience to nothing, but live only miraculously, die miraculously. Today our attention is centered upon the physical inexhaustibility of the universe, we must concentrate our thought upon that solid fact, because never before has man plundered and devastated to such a degree as today. We are therefore prone to forget that in the realm of the spirit there is also an inexhaustibility, that in this realm no gain is ever lost. (I forget from which text this quote derives.)
It was only after the curtain of turmoil and chaos fell that Henry Miller became the soothsayer. When one dives deep enough into ones own soul, into the atoms of ones very being, it is initially chaos and turmoil which are brought to the surface and keep one away from the surface, for one must really know oneself to surface. It is through the self-observation of this dark and treacherous journey, where one is wrapped by a constant state of becoming that one can finally stand revealed. Or in Miller’s words, become the ‘I of ones I.’ The Colossus of Maroussi is a dance on the surface of his soul. It is an amass of acceptance and praise. A lyrical voyage through Greece which naturally transfigures the landscape and the soil into its true potential, as the playground of gods.
The message Henry Miller conveys through his works of fiction and non-fiction have been repeated since time immemorial. It is a message of peace, but not the peace that represents the cessation of fighting or of war. He gives us a message of inward peace, as Jesus himself once said, ‘the peace that passeth understanding,’ fueled by an unremitting hope. For the old ways of the world are dying fast. It is our responsibility as humans to invoke the gods we undoubtedly are, a new wave of consciousness is rising out of our collective potential. What action you must take you already know, ask yourself honestly and the truth may be revealed. La-la-la! This is a song of praise, of peace and of hope. Amen.
Comments for Henry Miller and the Life Abundant
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1 On Thursday 31 July 2008 at 13:03 GMT thus spake Liz Jones:
I first discovered HM one year after he died, and I will never stop reading his books. They themselves are like the fabulous meals he describes and I will always be grateful to him for being able to retain some semblance of sanity