Growing In Stillness

Like Henry Miller, I'm convinced that the meaning of life lies in this world, not in the next world or in other worlds. Other worlds can take care of themselves. However, this kind of spiritual secularism, this faith in the saving grace of the here and now, is both wonderful and terrible. Wonderful because one can learn to relax and trust in the present moment; terrible because it entails an existential responsibility not to screw up. No stored karma; karma is being used right now. No deathbed conversion; the only conversion is a continual conversion of perception: to see a better world in the actual world, to find the miraculous in the day-to-day, the eternal in the temporal, the infinite in the finite.

For me, life has been a search, a quest, a becoming rather than a being, and perhaps it will ever remain so. The next person I meet, the next book I read, the next piece of music I hear, the next bend in the road, the next brow of the hill — always hold out such promise. This promise is rarely completely fulfilled. But there's always a new minute, a new day, a new landscape, a new philosophy, a new dream, a new sonata. This makes life exciting, fascinating, compelling; the prospect of the novel and the unexpected gets one up in the morning. Yet there's always a lurking feeling of disappointment, a suspicion that there must be something more, something better, something different; something deeper, more multi-layered and more satisfying.

How to reconcile acceptance of the now-as-all-there-is with the very human desire for betterment, for increased knowledge, for change? Can there, paradoxically, be a state of permanence in change, of stasis in motion, of stability in flux, of harmony in disharmony, of being in becoming? The nearest I've approached an answer to this is in Buddhism, Taoism and other related Eastern philosophies and religions.

Things grow and grow,

But each goes back to its root.

Going back to the root is stillness.

This means returning to what is.

Returning to what is

Means going back to the ordinary.

LAO-TZU Tao Te Ching

Translated by STEPHEN ADDISS and STANLEY LOMBARDO

Henry Miller: The Nature Of The Miraculous

Henry Miller became a special writer in my personal literary pantheon after reading his Rosy Crucifixion trilogy (Sexus, Plexus and Nexus) in my mid-twenties. I'd been devouring a lot of Jack Kerouac at the time — On the Road was a kind of beatnik bible to me as I hitchhiked my way round Britain and Europe — and as soon as I picked up Miller his influence on Kerouac was obvious. From the first pages of Sexus, Miller thrilled and shocked me. Here was life in all its random beauty, its bohemian seediness, its miracle-tinged ordinariness.

This sentence from Tropic of Cancer is emblematic of all of Miller's freewheeling, semi-autobiographical novels with their gutter romance, their shock value and their magnified, incorrigible lust for life:

To come upon a woman offering herself outside a urinal, where there are advertized cigarette papers, rum, acrobats, horse races, where the heavy foliage of the trees breaks the heavy mass of walls and roofs, is an experience that begins where the boundaries of the known world leave off.

For Miller any experience — no matter how humble, how unorthodox or how sleazy — was an opportunity to live life to the full. For Miller life was rich, multi-faceted, sacred; a wonder and a marvel. For Miller life was to be grabbed.

I went on to read other books by him: The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, an account of a trip through a decaying America after Miller returned there from Paris, and The Books in My Life, an enthusiastic panegyric to his favourite books and authors. The recommendations he made in this book reignited my own passion for such revolutionary writers as Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky and Krishnamurti, and pointed the way towards others, like Cendrars, Céline and Jean Giono — later to become some of my own favourites.

Recently I went back to Miller to read his essay collection, Stand Still Like the Hummingbird. I was not disappointed. The preface alone was inspiring. How could one not love this:

When you find you can go neither backward or forward, when you discover that you are no longer able to stand, sit or lie down, when your children have died of malnutrition and your aged parents have been sent to the poorhouse or the gas chamber, when you realize that you can neither write nor not write, when you are convinced that all the exits are blocked, either you take to believing in miracles or you stand still like the hummingbird. The miracle is that the honey is always there, right under your nose, only you were too busy searching elsewhere to realize it. The worst is not death but being blind, blind to the fact that everything about life is in the nature of the miraculous.

This is typical Miller — the almost comic exaggeration to make a point, the delight in the wonders of life, the proselytising desire to make us aware of the multitude of miracles at our very feet.

I liked pretty much all the essays in this book, although a couple were weaker than the rest — When I Reach for My Revolver and Money and How It Gets That Way (this last one, I thought, was too repetitious, over-clever and over-ambitious).

As I read my way with delight through these essays, I decided to jot down as an experiment words and phrases which spontaneously occurred to me describing the larger-than-life character of Miller's prose and personality. This was the result:

Passionate. Enthusiastic. Inspirational. Monstrously literate and erudite. Embracer of both the dark and the light (for him the apocalypse is to be embraced because it can herald the dawn of a new mankind). Life-affirming. Apocalyptic. Uncompromising. A worldly mystic. He sees the possibility of salvation in this world and this world only, in the here and now. He believes in the god in all of us (human beings carry divinity within them). Romantic. Idealistic. Revolutionary. Liberating. (He sees Jesus as a revolutionary liberator.) Humour and roguish charm. He exaggerates to make his point, delighting in being over the top, turning conventional ideas on their head. Doomy (the threat of the atom bomb and world extinction always present) but he relishes the doom. The writers and artists he likes (which are the ones he identifies with and who see the world rather like he does) he adulates, celebrates unreservedly. Contradictory. Trusts in the power of the imagination. An innocent, almost childlike glee in destruction, but only so that the new can arise from the ashes. A distinctive, individual voice. Propagandist, polemicist. Monster and angel.        

Haiku

two pileated

woodpeckers high in the oaks,

an acorn hits the roof

blueberries in a

pancake, midnight planets and

no less mystery

kayak in mist, no

memory card in the camera,

clicking away with joy

These three delightful haiku are part of Ruth Mowry's recent series of 'lake haiku', which you can find here and here on her blog washed stones.

But what is a haiku? The more you examine it 'intellectually', the more it eludes your grasp. And there's the answer! The haiku is no intellectual concept, no tricksy word game, no gaudy and intricate peacock of a poem. A haiku is the distilled essence of an objective, lived experience, simply and subtly told. I don't think a haiku is to be analysed; I think it's to be seen, heard, felt. Ruth herself feels that haiku enunciate a moment . . . experienced in the most condensed form and that writing haiku is practice in looking, listening, and finding the smallest connection a moment offers.

A haiku does not preach; it shows, not tells. Henry Miller writes this about the haiku in his essay Children Of The Earth: 

When all is said, I nevertheless concede that as long as I continue to write I remain perforce a propagandist. Only one kind of writing have I ever found which is devoid of this lamentable element, and that is the Japanese haiku. It is a form of poetry limited to so many syllables wherein the poet expresses his love, usually of nature, without making comparisons, without the use of superlatives. He tells only what is, or how it is. The effect, upon the Western reader at least, is usually one of jubilation. It is as if a weight had been taken from his shoulders. He feels absolved. 'Amen!' is all he can exclaim.

To live one's life in this spirit which informs the haiku strikes me as an ultimate . . . 

Having said this, there are certain semi-formal elements common to many successful haiku: the structure is usually (but not always) one of three short lines (these may have a 5-7-5 arrangement of syllables, but it's no strict rule); there's often a juxtaposition of two ideas which connect in a surprising way; many haiku contain references to the season of the year and to the natural world. But I'm analysing and intellectualising again. As soon as you try to pin down a haiku-butterfly, it flutters away. But you know one when you see one, hear one, feel one.

Inspired by Ruth's haiku, I attempted a couple of my own earlier this morning:

beyond human sight

in the reeds a bittern booms;

i feel my heart beat

your cheeks and lips are

salty with tears; far away

the moan of the sea

It occurs to me that, although it's actually quite difficult to write a really good haiku, it's an excellent way for the novice poet to try his or her hand at poetry for the first time.

Books Which Change Your Life

I like to think of mindfulness simply as the art of conscious living. You don't have to be a Buddhist or a yogi to practice it. In fact, if you know anything about Buddhism, you will know that the most important point is to be yourself and not try to become anything that you are not already. Buddhism is fundamentally about being in touch with your own deepest nature and leting it flow out of you unimpeded. It has to do with waking up and seeing things as they are. In fact, the word 'Buddha' simply means one who has awakened to his or her true nature. JON KABAT-ZINN Wherever You Go, There You Are

That's the last of my quotes from Jon Kabat-Zinn. It's time to move on to other things. My recent readings of his books Coming To Our Senses and Wherever You Go, There You Are came at just the right time in my life and have affected me deeply. It's strange how sometimes exactly the right book is 'gifted' to us at exactly the right moment in our lives - a book which may quickly become a landmark book, influencing us, rescuing us, inspiring us in profound, often life-changing ways.

When I was in my late teens I read The Penguin Krishnamurti Reader and The Second Penguin Krishnamurti Reader and these books fired a life-long interest in Zen Buddhism and were mind-blowing for me at the time. They affected absolutely the way I thought and the way I lived. Other books which have done this to me are Thoreau's Walden, the novels of Hermann Hesse and John Fowles, and (this may surprise you) the novels of Henry Miller. I read all of these writers in my twenties.

I wonder how many of you have totemic books you read at a critical time in your lives - books which altered your mindset? The power of the written word can be truly astonishing.

Only that day dawns to which we are awake. THOREAU