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.        

Nine Pages

In his brilliant new book, On Poetry, Glyn Maxwell invents an imaginative exercise designed to help the poet put some black marks onto white paper:

Take nine sheets of blank paper and pretend the following things about them:
That the first page is physically hurt by your every word.
That the second page is turned on by every syllable.
That every mark on the third page makes you remember more.
On the fourth, less, like dementia.
That God can only hear you if you're writing on the fifth page.
That only touching the sixth page are you hidden from God.
That every word you write on the seventh prolongs the time from now until the moment you meet that mythical creature known as The One.
That every word you write on the eighth brings that moment closer, yes, but makes your time together shorter.
The ninth page says you have only nine words left in your life.

I was reminded once more of Jack Kerouac's writing tips.

Tempest

Bob Dylan and his band live in Bologna, 2006. (Image from Wikimedia Commons.)

One minute before the day of the release of Bob Dylan's thirty-fifth studio album, Tempest, listening to the Internet-available taster track and first single, Duquesne Whistle, becomes a sacred act.

Believe in the holy contour of life. JACK KEROUAC Belief And Technique For Modern Prose

Hell is empty, and all the devils are here. SHAKESPEARE The Tempest

We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep. SHAKESPEARE The Tempest

You taught me language, and my profit on't / Is, I know how to curse. SHAKESPEARE The Tempest

I long to hear the story of your life, which must / Take the ear strangely. SHAKESPEARE The Tempest

How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, / That has such people in it! SHAKESPEARE The Tempest

This thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine. SHAKESPEARE The Tempest

Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, / Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. / Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments / Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices... SHAKESPEARE The Tempest

Now I will believe / That there are unicorns... SHAKESPEARE The Tempest 

He not busy being born is busy dying. BOB DYLAN It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)

On The Road With A Towel

Where was I going? What was I doing? I'd soon find out. On The Road JACK KEROUAC

The problem with the rat race is that, even if you win, you're still a rat. The Hitch-hiker's Guide To Europe KEN WELSH

On the drive back home from the Lake Distict I picked up a hitch-hiker in Ennerdale and dropped him off near Windermere railway station. He was a young climber and would-be climbing instructor and had never been to the Lakes before. His method was simple: decide on the direction you feel like taking as soon as you wake up, then walk, scramble and climb all the high ground you encounter on the way, regardless of footpaths. He was travelling as light as possible, but sensibly carrying a tent, stove and maps with him.

I tend to pick up hitch-hikers (not that there are many around these days) for I was once one myself. In the late 60s/early 70s hitch-hikers were a lot more common than they are now. It was quite usual to see them congregating in a shabby line at the top of motorway slip roads - thumbs in the air, Ban the Bomb and Che Guevara motifs on the rucksack, and cigarette papers in the top pocket of the blue denim jacket.

I'd like to believe this 'sharing a car' philosophy was a pursuit of 'green living' way ahead of its time - but the reality is: we were all completely skint. That - plus we entertained excitingly seductive hippie notions about Zen and Jack Kerouac (his book On The Road was our Bible) and interacting with strangers and the randomness of life. Hitch-hiking was a way of life itself, an existential attitude - going with the flow, rejecting convention and the rat race. On the road we felt closer in spirit to our Beat heroes.

Apart from On The Road, the other book poking up out of the side pocket of our rucksacks was The Hitch-hiker's Guide To Europe by Ken Welsh. This was a cult book of the 1970s. First published by Pan in 1971, I can't believe the final edition came out as late as 1996 - by then it had surely long since had its day. Among the book's many claims to fame are these: its youth-oriented and budget-conscious style makes it the forerunner of today's Rough Guides and Lonely Planets; it was the inspiration for Douglas Adams' The Hitch-hiker's Guide To The Galaxy; it was the book most stolen from public libraries in the 1970s; and its lightweight philosophy was far ahead of its time - remember Ken's 6 uses of the towel, for him one of the most important items of kit? (Scarf, groundsheet, extra layer of clothing, poncho, flannel - oh, and something to dry yourself with!)

My own much-used, grimy and beer-stained copy disintegrated in the back of a truck on a German Autobahn many decades ago. But I still retain an affectionate place for it in my memory. It was invaluable for its sound advice on when and where to hitch, and where and how to find cheap food and accommodation; for giving the low-down country-by-country on food markets, flea markets, youth hostels and campsites; for its useful list of addresses of embassies and suchlike; and for what seemed at the time its shiveringly dangerous knowledge of pawnshops, black markets and red light districts.

The early 1970s were golden hitch-hiking years for me - and I covered many miles this way in Britain and Europe. I remember Britain and Germany were always pretty good - but France was a hard nut to crack. A friend and I spent more or less one whole day fruitlessly sticking out our thumbs on the Parisian ring road. In the end a young student in a 2CV took pity on us and invited us back to his parents' house where we camped in the garden. He turned out to be a skilled maker of custom-built guitars. The next day he drove us to the Porte D'Italie - an egress from Paris where he (and Ken Welsh) assured us we would get a lift without too much trouble...

After several hours we gave up and caught the train to Lyon - then later camped in someone's field in Vienne. (You know how it is when you're young - it doesn't enter your head whether something is 'private' or not.) We made a kind of barbecue out of some bricks and metal grilles which were lying around. The next day Louis, the kindly but eccentric, Frenchly mustachioed owner of the land, told us some thieves had come in the night to hide their stash in one of his outbuildings. In fact we'd heard them and seen their car lights. Amused by and (I think) secretly admiring our effrontery at camping without permission on his property, he offered us a lift down to Avignon in his dusty old Citroen camionette. He was an itinerant knife grinder, and had all his knife-grinding equipment in the back of the van. It took us all day to reach Avignon on back routes through a wonderful landscape - I remember the miles and miles of vineyards - and it felt good to be speaking French with a genuine Frenchman.

These are the kinds of things that used to happen when hitch-hiking in those days. I could recount many more. But things got a little heavy when I had several unpleasant experiences - a string of lifts with some total weirdos, and one with a couple of guys out of their minds on drugs. Finally I packed it in after a crazy lorry driver tried to scare me a little with a knife. I got out the cab rather hurriedly and hardly ever hitch-hiked again.

The Macrocosm Lies Within the Microcosm

The further you travel, the less you know (Tao Te Ching). Discuss! I think this means that covering big distances, physical or mental, has nothing necessarily to do with knowledge. And pilgrimage nothing necessarily to do with attaining wisdom. Nirvana can be an instantaneous thing - not necessarily the result of years of diligent effort and pursuit.

It's how you filter, deal with and learn from experience that counts - not just having more and more random experiences. Though personally I love random experience - in a Jack Kerouac kind of way.

To echo Dylan - when younger I felt so much "older" (more pretentious?) than when I read the Beat writers now. Perhaps I'm just journeying towards a profound simplicity? Any thoughts, anyone?