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.
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