Henry Miller and Dreaming Wide Awake

"Books are human actions in death".   Balzac

Henry Miller once said, the brain is in the heart. I remember these words, like profound dreams and hallucinatory visions, because they illustrate Mr. Miller's fundamental premise that no writer can ever put down what he intends to say.
 
Miller often wrote about what occurs in people's minds prior to actually picking up a pen, brush or whatever instrument at hand. Or as he put it, the deep primal flux that precludes creation or expression. A state with no dimension, no form and no true element:
 
"In this preliminary state... what disappears suffers no destruction; something which was already there, something imperishable, like memory, or matter, or God, is summoned and in it one flings himself like a twig into a torrent."
 
Which means, I think, that by trying to capture the imperishable, we change it. 
 
Tao-like
 
Miller relished both spirit and flesh, which is to say, he was incapable of understanding things with just his intellect. 
 
So he wrote about the importance of surpassing so-called understanding through acceptance, a type of metaphysics beyond words and wordplay; a way of "becoming" and "being" akin to the spirit of Tao:
 
"It cannot be understood; it can only be accepted or rejected. If accepted we are revitalized; if rejected we are diminished."
 
In other words, the most we can really expect are tiny reminders of what is fluid and intangible - which is to say, the universe.
 
What of art?
 
Mr Miller described those who try to put miraculous happenings down as people who haven't learned to accept things as they are and, as such, not fully awake.
 
In his estimation, art and all forms of expression - no matter how subtle or ingenious - are just crude hieroglyphs chiseled in pain and sorrow.
 
"If we could accept ourselves completely, a work of art, in fact the whole world of art, would die of malnutrition." (his italics)
 
So what would life be like if everyone could accept the world as it is?
 
"Long before that, books would cease to exist... men wide awake and dreaming, their powers of communication (with one another and with the spirit that moves them) would be so enhanced as to make writing seem like the harsh and raucous squawks of an idiot."
 
Which means, I guess, that nobody would be satisfied with an imitation if the real thing were available.
Filed under  //   dreams   Henry Miller   literature  

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Neruda's Light

In the midst of so much darkness and light, let's honor a great Chilean poet from a different epoch yet with so much

light
like a green
latticework of branches,
shining
on every leaf,
drifting like clean
white sand.
 
Now we have such different light, a dearth of clean light now, exceeded only by a dearth of clean white sand. The light that illumined the poetry of Neruda seems so distant from the light that breaks darkness now.
 
The present is not "as smooth - as a board - and fresh - this hour - this day - as clean - as an untouched glass."
 
Perhaps Neruda is only a touch of the past. For our present, as we cut it, size it and direct it, "brings nothing from yesterday that can't be redeemed - nothing from the past."
 
Or perhaps, as Neruda surmised, we're only
 
step
by step
feet firmly
planted on the wood
of the moment
 
irrevocably wed to what happens now. Which for me is what we see in the same light, our common ground. 
 
That Light 
(my translation which, quite frankly, is a shadow of the original)
 
The light in Celon gave me life
but was also living death - for to live
in a diamond's intensity
is a lonely vocation for corpses:
a bird made diaphonous, or
a spider webbing the sky, then gone.
 
Hurt by this island light
I now keep circumspect
as though a beam of distant honey
might suddenly change me into ash.
 
I arrived more foreign then a puma,
kept a distance, knowing nobody
dreading the occipital light of a paradise
that might alter my brain.
(Light that falls on black clothing
pierces the cloth and all decorum.)
Since then my goal has been
to save each day's nakedness for myself.
 
Perhaps those who've never strayed
in order to get closer, as I did
can ever understand
nor be as lost as I was,
a carbonized number in the dark.
 
Since then, only bread and the light.
 
The soul's light and kitchen light
night light and the light of morning
light under the sheets of a dream
suckled by light,
I live as I must
in my destiny's ruthless lucidity
between desperation and brillance
disowned
by kingdoms that were never mine
 
The nets that tremble in the light
come up pure from the ocean.
Filed under  //   literature   Pablo Neruda   poetry  

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Malcom Lowry’s Dark Night

"When you lack the time to stop and think", Malcom Lowry once said, "the only hope is the next drink".

Malcom Lowry has always been a figure admired in Mexican literary circles for his warm attachment to Mexico. Lowry spent 3 years living here, between 1936 and 1939, first in Cuernavaca and later in Oxaca, preparing and writing his masterpiece, Under the Volcano, considered one of the great novels of the 20th century. The book depicts a series of complex and unwillingly destructive relationships set against a rich evocation of Mexico.

The brilliant English novelist would have turned 100 on July 28, and his love of the the country made it a special occasion for the Mexican cultural elite.  According to El Economista, the writer viewed the universe as an unchangable mystery similar to a long dark night, a riddle full of tragic messages and coincidences.

In his first drafts, Mr. Lowry started his work with the line “It was the day of the dead”, a clear reference to the famous  Mexican celebration. Later versions of these drafts cost the author years of arduous work, the break-up of his marriage and an inexorable decline as a result of alcoholism. He died deeply suspicious of his own talent, convinced that fame, like drunkenness itself, was a destructive force.

But something about Mexico, about the Day of the Dead, about Mexican's happy-go-lucky acceptance of the past (and future) clearly fascinated this man. Perhaps he saw something here he'dnever imagined before: a profound acceptance by its inhabitants of life (simply) as it is.

The author seemed to be a man torn from within looking without, intent on finding complex and allusive layers of symbolism in his daily life. In Mexico he found something that resonated powerfully. What? Perhaps his own "dark night" paralleled Mexico’s birth as a nation: conquest, disease, destruction, imposition over the ruins of an old civilization. A place born of dislocation - just as Lowry emerged, as a child, from dislocation and sickness.

In sum, a place that paralleled the author's own identity.

I can visualize him opening his eyes after spending a restful night in one of the many villages that inspired his work, seeing the shocking green of the mountain forests, inhaling the strong herbal-scented air and observing simple people working and laughing and doing what they always did as though things were exactly as they should be.

A curious light thrown upon darkness, rich in human spectacle and sentiment... in a word, medicine for this brilliant man’s embattled soul.

 

 

Filed under  //   culture   literature   Mexico  

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About

Mine was a clamorous New York childhood spent on boardwalks and in delis between the south shore and the teeming Metropolis. Since childhood, I've strolled with Sicilians and strutted with Latins. Which explains nothing about life in a big Latin American metropolis. Cheers to a big world!