Sexus
21 August 2007
Book One of The Rosy Crucifixion
by: Henry Valentine Miller
Henry Miller and his principle of pleasure walk hand in hand. Hence, Henry and sex go together like mozzarella and tomatoes, like figs and prosciutto, like salt and olive oil, like cock and cunt. Henry’s is not a cold-blooded erection out for any wet and warm stable. He is a man of calm and patience and he takes whatever comes his way. In Sexus Henry only thinks sex when he is having it, but it is his constant aura of sex that brings fortuitous situations his way. Sex is in his being and imprinted in his deepest layer. But remember, sex is synonymous for pleasure and the hunger for the divine enjoyment of all things. Pleasure draws us out of our measly existence and places us within the folds of that which is greater.
Food doesn’t satisfy hunger nor drink thirst. Food, sexual or otherwise is only satisfying to the appetites. Hunger is something else. Nobody can satisfy hunger. Hunger is the soul’s barometer. Ecstasy is the norm. Serenity is the freedom from weather conditions-the permanent climate of the stratosphere.
Sexus is the first of the series entitled The Rosy Crucifixion. The Rosy Crucifixion being the one book Henry Miller ever intended on writing; meant to chronicle his life and marriage to the phantasmic June Mansfield aka Mara aka Mona. Sexus is of the transition from one wife to the next, from the prudish piano teacher Maude to Mona, the dance hall extraordinaire. Though what the reader sees of Maude is not so prude at all. I dare say that with Maude, Henry gives us the most sexy sex, the most desperate, the most graphic, though more of that later. Then again Mona, whose whole persona is Maude’s antithesis, is a body writhing with electricity. Maude is earthy and of emotions easily understood. Maude sticks where Mona seems to break up in the ephemeral air.
The question of Mona’s actuality looms large in anything ever written about her. Between Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller a portrait has been created with sections of color missing, with bits of color morphing. Mona or June is the writer’s dream. She is the great elusive. Her impact on Henry can not be denied, she helped to bring about the man and the writer we know today. “It isn’t a woman you need-it is an instrument to liberate yourself.” Henry nods in agreement. He seems to have seen the whole failure of the relationship coming, for it was built on the wobbly ground of Mona’s imagined self. Mona is anything she wants herself to be, from her family and their origins, her profession, her dreams; she is beauty weaving a rapidly changing story, even her body transforms several times through the length of the book. Who is June Mansfield? (Wikipedia seems to know.) She is the grasshopper trying to be forced into a glass jar, one might as well give up.
The complete terrain of Sexus takes place between the meeting of Mona in a dance hall and their marriage in Hoboken, NY, to follow with a reception in Henry’s favorite burlesque. The peaks jutting between what must be deemed the beginning and the end are as jagged and varied as Henry, the writer, can make them out to be. There is the always constant knowledge of, ‘To Write,’ hovering around each summit. Henry, the man, floats along these pristine mountain lakes but can never glimpse the bottom. He stirs his body. He attempts to shake off his lecherous friends but to no avail. Anything he managed to write at that time was lodged securely in his head. A subway ride which carries him through the future to the past, dinners that spawn Henry in all his glory, conversations that go on for pages. He was living on the edge just waiting to be pushed over:
If you stop still and look at things. . . I say look, not think, not criticize. . . the world looks absolutely crazy to you. And it is crazy, by God! It’s just as crazy when things are normal and peaceful as in times of war or revolution. The evils are insane evils. The pancreases are insane pancreases. Because we are all driven like dogs. We’re running away. From what
He talks as if he has written his great novel, his friends refer to him as a writer even though he has not dropped down one meaningful word. He thinks of his adolescence, when he walked around with books in his head and Nietzsche under his arm. To know one will write, to know one can write and that there is this burning energy which only art can release is one thing, but to put words to paper is another. Henry needed Mona to push him over the edge. “The world will only begin to get something of value from me the moment I stopped being a serious member of society and became-myself.”
The other terrain of Sexus is as the name implies, sex. Before venturing out into such rugged landscape, I would like to ask why Henry has ever been accused of writing in the obscene? To separate Henry’s sex from other aspects of his work is a crime. Just as it is a crime to separate the man from the writer. Henry Miller wrote spiritual pornography which aims its jabs at the body and its senses, opening them simultaneously with the mind. None the less, Henry Miller was a man quite obsessed with sex, that I can’t deny. These videos (Bathroom monologue one and two and three) are an especially good portrait of Henry as a sexual collector in his later life. I suspect that sex, was for Henry, one of the greatest expressions of pleasure that he had been given or that we have been given, food coming closely behind. Sex is the indulgence of the body, the body relinquished for pleasure. How else but through sex are we able to touch the pearly gates of heaven as our bellies rub in the dirt?
The sex of Henry Miller is worlds away from the sex forced upon us today. The sex of today is just another manipulating Medusa-like tentacle controlled by the media. This sex is public sex. This tentacle has picked off the word sexy and holds it in a constricting and life-depleting grasp. The passive subjects to this wielding and thrashing beast are, lo and behold! adolescent girls. Girls out on the search for identity, pliable and passive girls, girls who have picked out the easiest self from the ever expanding mass marketplace. If one wonders what is sexy today all one really has to do is take at look at what any fourteen year old girl is wearing. The adolescent damsel in distress does not wail out for help, they are passive and unaware of their affliction. Young girls shaping their breasts for more cleavage, shortening their skirts, tightening their bodices for more shape. Unlike the past, where situations forced children to soon become adults, now children are dressing like adults though remaining children. They are assaulted by the media with a constant stream of images and of conflicting symbols of who to be. These girls are walking around with a loaded gun and have no clue how to fire. Most likely the thing will go off when they are staring straight down the barrel. What has possibly convinced these girls that they must be sexy above all else? Sexy has flooded their person. When these girls stand before the mirror who is it that they see? It is surely not their own self. The media has stolen sexy from the self and has adorned it with the latest style.
Sexy, like sex, rises out of the pit of the self. Both are of the flavor of our deepest being. Sometimes there is the taste of dirt, at other times it is of the cool and earthy water of the well. Henry Miller splashes some of that water on his cock, he has had a long night. Henry’s sex moans for more as he switches his position. Henry’s sex, unlike Lawrence’s sex, whose sanctity of the act almost cleanses it of its animal origins, brings it back to the point beyond the point. The sex that seems to pivot the book is that which Henry indulges in with Maude. Maude, the prude, as he has us to believe. The last romp they have before the close of the book, he leaves her as serene as a ghost. What has passed before was a grand scene of fucking, a threesome of Maude’s own design. Juices flowing from every orifice and at the end, which isn’t the end, Henry exclaims, “Jesus Christ I’m exhausted. I’m fucked out.” This scene is more sexy then anything any star-spangled media puppet could gyrate before my face. It’s the power of words and my own imagination that leave me begging for more. It is the careful unveiling of what I thought to be hidden. This is the sex of Henry Miller; it screams at us until we rise from our stupor. He wants us all to hunger. To realize our own sensations. To be aware. He wants it so bad that he will fuck any woman out there in any way he can until we are all awake. Henry is fucking for us.
I feel sometimes as though I am going to burst. I really don’t give a damn about the misery of the world. I take it for granted. What I want is to open up. I want to know what’s inside of me. I want to open everybody up. I’m like an imbecile with a can opener in his hand, wondering where to begin-to open up the earth.
To close I must add that in putting Sexus down it was as natural a movement to pick Plexus up. Opening to the first page, the first sentence jumped out at me like a razor-eyed bug, “In her tight-fitting Persian dress, with turban to match, she looked ravishing.” It is a line too sexy to resist. And so I will read The Rosy Crucifixion in succession.
Bracciano, Italy
August 2007