REMEMBERING MY FRIEND HENRY MILLER

acropolis, athens, greece

Back into reading Henry Miller again. Finished the Colossus of Maroussi, which turned out to be one of my top favorite reads and influences on my life. The first hundred pages into The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, the book Miller wrote after Colossus. It is his story of returning to USA after living in Paris where he wrote the novels that made his name. A case was made against Tropic of Cancer all the way to the Supremes for bad language, 1961. It was the Warren Court then, an intelligent Supreme Court without so many corporate plants in that time. Miller used the efword and Grove Press was taken to court. It seems strange in this time the Supreme Court can make an intelligent decision. It amounted to the art book of its time. Originally published in Paris in 1934, it was republished in New York and charged with obscenity. Went to the Court in 1961. Immediately, it became the book of the year, Grove Press box sets, paperback edition everywhere. Until the trial, Miller got by on money borrowed from friends, largely. James Joyce's Ulysses, if I recall correctly, needed a Supreme Court trial before it could be published this side of the Atlantic. It became well known as a result, but not so widely read. In Charleston, South Carolina, was a small bookstore across the street from the College of Charleston, The Book Basement, where I worked through my college years. One of the customers before I came to the store, a generation older than me would vacation in Europe and brought back in his luggage half a dozen copies of Ulysses for the bookstore when it did not yet have an American edition. The distinction of a Court case before the Supremes distinguishes Miller with Joyce. Very different writers in about every way the differences can be noted. They both had very large minds.

book cover

Air-Conditioned Nightmare starts in New York upon Miller's return from a year in Greece where he stayed mostly with English writer Lawrence Durrell and his wife Nancy on the island Corfu. Colossus is written around his trip to Athens and Crete. From New York he teamed up with artist friend Abe Rattner he knew in Paris, and they drove down South through Charleston, then across the deep South to New Orleans, Rattner's destination. Miller drove on to the middle California coast, Big Sur, this the early 1940s, war in Europe, France overtaken, Italy overtaken, and Greece in fear of German invasion. Miller was getting out of Europe with the wolves snapping at his heels. In a three year journey across USA by car, Miller, who left Brooklyn not long out of high school and lived in Paris, wanted to acquaint himself with America. I'd guess after all the years of being "the American," expected to explain and being blamed for American idiocies and to take the praise for American greatness, none of which he had anything to do with. I had a lot of problem with that part of being in another country. I got so sick of "you Americans," I turned mean spirited. In a London pub a man beside me at the bar where I was having a Worthington E, ordered a drink with minute instructions for amount of this and that, temperature. I'd seen that before. Out of curiosity, I asked what it was about. I was thinking, I wouldn't dare expect a waiter or bartender or waitress in America even to listen to a list of instructions that long. In the man's huffy, hear-hear, arrogant way he said it was "for the taste. Why do you Americans drink?" I'd had it up to over my eyebrows hearing you-Americans, like I'm responsible for everybody else, so I said with much inner mirth and a straight face, having fun at the thought of affirming his boring clichés, "To get drunk," like, why else? It's the same with all minorities in America worn out from hearing, "your people." I don't even remember what he looked like, but do remember he turned his back to me and I about busted out laughing. Later, at home a few years, some friends were going to London and asked what it's like. I said you will get an understanding of what it's like to be black in America.

 

henry miller

Miller went to France young, uninterested in living in USA, though when he returned twenty or so years later, America the people, the landscape, held his attention and became the focus of his attention. Reading in Air-Conditioned Nightmare the third time, I'm seeing Miller's influence on my own understanding and interest in the variety of American cultures. Marketing trains us to believe it's one big happy classless society where everybody loves money. Of course, it's not anywhere near that simple, same as your-people is not. I used to think it was obvious and everybody got it because it's right there in our faces. Used to think. In the past. Repeated experience throughout a lifetime has shown me the obvious is a mystery for many more adults than I am comfortable admitting to myself. I have to remind myself we humans are all on different levels of consciousness, all of us mixed together in one boiling, swirling stew. In this time of international wars and population explosion our souls are exploring unfamiliar territory at all times. Perhaps this has something to do with why we cling to the familiar, others of our own race and nationality. I believe, with no backup to support it, there are souls actually born in the wrong place to the wrong people. I'd say this situation would make a very confused individual, or not. One might think the child of a Jew and a Catholic would be confused, but it's not the case. We're so involved in the rapid change of everything around us and inside ourselves we embrace the change in adoration of the New, the latest, such that we've become a culture of the New. I stopped painting when I saw my babies going into the world of see-my-new. It's put on the wall in its place, "see my new...." I have a difficult time letting paintings go. Selling them makes them products. I don't like my babies becoming products, same as I don't like raising calves toward the burger market.

 

book cover

 

I believe I can trace the evolution of my curiosity about the varieties of American people, the different cultures here from region to region, national background, race, level of income, class, to Henry Miller's Air-Conditioned Nightmare. His book reads as contemporary today as it did in its first year of publication, 1945. He wrote it in my infancy a few hundred miles north of my birthplace. I read it first time in the late 1970s. It was contemporary then. This is evidence of one of my favorite aspects of Miller's writing, the immediacy. He pulls me into his mind and takes me on a mind journey that is here, now. Brings to mind Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, prose poems of invisible cities written in an Italian Surrealist manner by a Marco Polo of the mind. Miller makes you feel where he is in the telling such that I see in my mind's eye where he is, the café, the boat ride to Crete, the streets in Heraklion, the landscape by road across the island to the Minoan ruins. I made the trip seven years after reading Miller's account of his visit in 1939, thereabouts. At the time it seemed like a kind of subconscious pilgrimage to the first known places Greek civilization evolved from, even to the Om point, the omphalos at Delphi, the center of the universe according to early Greek civilization. I did not remember that I was guided to those places by Henry Miller. He too, had taken the road from Athens to Delphi, one of the many beautiful drives on earth. He too, felt the powerful energy of the place. When I felt the energy of the place, and I wasn't even tuned to "energies" then, I understood why the oracle chose Delphi. I reviewed my own tour of Greece in Colossus of Maroussi after forgetting Miller's tour of Greece was the model for my own. I wanted to see the places he wrote about, that I saw in my mind's eye reading his account. I've been looking for something to read that I really want to read, that I want to pick up a second time. I'd pick up something, look at the first few sentences and none of them made me want to finish the page. Didn't know what I was looking for to read. Nothing took hold of me. Then I picked up Colossus. Now I only want to read Miller next, Nightmare. It's an unwitting, subconscious review of Henry Miller's substantial influence on my manner of thinking, the scope of my ethical foundation. I feel awed reading these two books at this time in the life. In a way it's like reading my astrological chart. These two books have influenced me more deeply than I knew or even might have imagined. Another strong influence comes to mind, Leo Tolstoy. Very powerful influence, especially through his biography by Henri Troyat. And Sitting Bull's biography. These are the people I've discovered through reading that my soul connects with, like it connects with Ralph Stanley's and the Carter Family's singing, the voices the soul of these mountains chose to sing through.

omphalos

delphi

 

 

 

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MY FRIEND HENRY MILLER

Continuing to look for where my own art impulse came from. I know it is in childhood somewhere, because all the way along I longed for art expression. I had self-esteem issues that were debilitating, stopping the kid from doing something I might want to do by telling self I'm not able for any of a number of possible reasons. I'd learned to believe that anything I thought up had been thought before. Anything I can do, somebody else can do better. Or I'll never be able to accomplish, I don't know enough, am not detail-oriented enough. The list can go on forever because these roadblocks are arbitrary, imagined for the particular occasion. All through school I was taught from all directions that if you're going to do something you gotta be great. You gotta make an A. You gotta make a lot of money. You gotta be a leader. I never wanted to be any of that, I, myself. My learning mind was engaged in trying to figure out how this world works and how to get used to its ways and enter that jumble and make a living. It was hard for me to learn it well enough to believe I could jump in and swim. I didn't want to learn it. Gave it a go in college years and a few years after, but it didn't take. I only knew what I did not want as far as work or career is concerned, yet at the same time I had wants that were inaccessible, like a half a million dollar Italian sports car, teenage stuff. In my teens, music was the first art form I paid attention to, rock & roll. Little Richard's early songs had some pretty good lyrics, so did Chuck Berry's. I was drawn to songs with more or less artful lyrics and musicianship. Always listened closely to individual instruments in the bands. Never learned an instrument. Too much chaos in the air at home to allow for learning. And too much chaos inside my head. I knew no one who had ever heard of art. Yet I had a longing inside for some kind of artistic self-expression, believed only gifted people could do art, and it had to be learned with years of training, or so I'd been led to believe. This was the Fifties when abstract expressionism was happening in New York and nobody outside New York knew about it, except in the universities I had no access to.

 

 

 

It is looking like the longing to write came from the childhood years of lying in the bed at night crying from frustration and rage, I felt like I had valuable things to say, understandings I wanted to write down so I'd remember them. I didn't write them because I had no privacy. I was given a diary for a birthday and never wrote in it knowing mother would read whatever I wrote and tell daddy what she saw. I learned to keep to myself any ideas or insights, new understandings. I'm recalling at an age of around ten I'd been out riding the bicycle on an old dirt road through a big field that seemed endless to a kid. I listened to the crows and watched them fly. They were saying haw, haw. It was not caw, but haw. I listened and listened. It was always haw, not caw. Later, at home, excited about my discovery, the kid told daddy the crows are saying haw, not caw. That set him off. NO THEY DON'T--THEY GO KAW, emphasis on the K. By this time, the kid was accustomed to it. Of course, they say KAW. Nothing came of that. By this time I already knew better that to try to talk to him, but was so excited by the discovery about the crows, I kicked myself later for being so ignorant to forget rule number one: do not attempt to talk to him--you know better. That was probably the last attempt I made. It was excitement that made me go against what I knew, so I got with myself about letting excitement take me out of control. He taught the kid self-control because every attempt to approach him with positive attention was turned immediately into negative return. At age 14 crying in the bed at night, the kid got with self and made a vow, I will never cry over them the rest of my life for any reason. That was the end of it. Never cried over anything having to do with either one of them again. Didn't have a problem with crying for some other reason. It was in that time I secured my heart in a vault and forgot the password. School was my safe zone. It's where I found others I liked who liked me. School was where my friends were.

 

 

I had a longing to write, but could not write. It was all I could do to write a one page paper for a class. Had zero command of the language. Had a natural gift for spelling. Or so it seemed. By the end of high school I could not write anything that would make sense. Had a longing to learn the language. By end of high school, I could not read with even minimum comprehension. I dove into reading when school was over. I wanted to go to college, but knew I could not read. Tried taking some classes and learned I wasn't even ready to start. Didn't even consider taking an art class, self-esteem on the bottom of the ocean. Didn't believe they'd even let me in. I was drawn more to learn the language, learn to read with comprehension, feeling a longing to write, knowing I did not know how to write. I read as much as spare time allowed. Bought paperbacks of best-sellers from drugstore paperback racks. Found some interesting books there. Found The Third Eye, the story of the Tibetan monk. It blew my circuits. The ultimate escape from my reality. But I knew I could not sit still that much. Read Alan Watts' The Way of Zen. Didn't get it, but got it read. Some understandings sifted through the chaos of my mind and were retained. It was an introduction to future readings of journals of Zen monks, like Hakuin, that served later to inform reading Chinese and Japanese poetry with a little better understanding than without the peephole into the spiritual vision of the East. I gradually took an interest in Eastern religions, Buddhism and Hinduism. From what I saw in the reading, it was the same as Bible teachings, different places, different names, the same stories. I was going the way of mind, the path of knowledge. I knew I was the bottom of the barrel where knowledge was concerned, and I wanted to correct that. I wanted to learn how to read and learn how to write. I felt like I had something to say without knowing what it was. A rumbling within needed expression.

 

 

 

Here, again, Henry Miller enters. I found a friend when Henry Miller entered my life. Getting close to the core of the matter now. Almost finished  rereading his Colossus of Maroussi, I am seeing, page after page, how I retained what I learned from him and what I learned from him became my own way of living. He encouraged my interest in art. And he encouraged my interest in writing. The interest was already there. Upon college graduation, I worked a year, saved money, sold everything I had with the exception of some LPs and books. Spent a month in Athens. Went to the acropolis half a dozen times, the museum of antiquities, and went to Crete and took a bus from Iraklion across the island to Phaestos to see the ruins of Knossos, the beginning of Greek civilization. And back to the mainland at Athens, took a one day tour bus to the ruins at Delphi. Reading earlier today I came upon his visit to Delphi and before that his visit to Crete. I had forgotten that Miller was the motivation for me to want to go to those places. He published the book a year before I was born. It was almost thirty years after his visit that I was there. Nothing had changed in those places. Reading it now, I can see in my mind's eye the places he saw and wrote about. We took the same road across Crete, and I saw the same landscape he saw. It really is as magical as he tells it. By magical I mean it has a glow about it, like an aura that is not visible, though it enhances the visible, gives the feeling that it's alive. So it's Henry Miller where I got my fascination for Greece, modern Greece more than ancient Greece, though the Greek plays are a pinnacle of art. It is still a regret within that the library in Alexandria burned and took so much we'll never see. It makes what we have all the more precious, Medea, Prometheus Bound, Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone. They make Shakespeare seem provincial. It is looking I have to point to Henry Miller for the core of my impulse to art by writing. Meher Baba came along later and opened my heart with a can opener. It took awhile. By this time in the life, I feel like my heart has opened sufficiently that I can live by a balance of head and heart, and write from that balance. And from the balance possibly be able to write something from time to time worth reading.

 

 

the dalai lama

 

 

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IMITATING HENRY MILLER'S ART

 

fiddle head fern

A week has gone by since Trish Weaver's prompt for a theme, life imitating art, art imitating art. I've meant every day to pursue the prompt, but didn't feel ready. I like the clever pictures some people have made in response, posing next to a painting or a sculpture in the same pose. I want to do it in writing. How to approach it has been a puzzle. It came to me in the middle of the week that I am reading Henry Miller's Colossus of Maroussi, a book that influenced my life more than I know. I'm discovering its influence as I read, remembering much that was forgotten. It has influenced my writing without me knowing it until now, reading Henry Miller again after fifteen to twenty years of not reading anything by him. A few times I've found interviews with him on YouTube. I'd forgotten the flow of his writing style, which I'm loving even more now than then. I'd bought the Penguin paperback in a bookstore I found in Athens when the ship I was on spent a few days in port there. I made a bee line to the Acropolis that stands on a hill in the center of the city. I didn't know anything about it except that these were foundation stones in Western Civ. Then, I was in the last month of being 22, barely literate, buried under a mountain of responsibilities to other people's expectations. In the time of the life when I didn't know how to be responsible. Still don't, but really did not then. I was in a state of confusion like a blender on HI chopping walnuts that look like atrophied brains. I was reading JD Salinger, Albert Camus, Jean Genet, the darling of the French Existentialists, an idealized unrepentant criminal who could only write in prison. The French writers appealed to the government to let him out, he's such a flower in this world. Out of prison he could not write, and was a menace to society. He was a thief who idealized the life of a thief. In popular lingo of today, he had no moral compass. And he was a brilliant writer, Rimbaud again, this time in prose. In 1972, I had the privilege by way of chance to see an opening night performance of Genet's play, The Balcony. Royal Shakespeare Company in London with actors like Ian Holmes, Vivien Merchant. I didn't care what night it was for the play, I was in awe of the opportunity to be in London at the same time it was playing.

 

 

jack in the pulpits

 

I was reading some pretty heady stuff in the infancy of my literacy. I chose reading that would pull me along, reading that required close attention. If it wasn't out in front of me, almost beyond my reach, it bored me. I felt so incredibly uneducated, coming out of high school barely able to read with comprehension, unable to focus attention, rejecting religion as a tumor on the brain, the few controlling the many, looking for the perspective that was my own in the great Unknown of the interior self. I was in the waist of my own hourglass and didn't know it. I was passing from the world of living by other people's expectations to living by my own. Reading got me through the time when my head was in a knot.  Reading was something like looking out the window of a mental institution at the trees and birds. In that time of reading novels of WW2 French Resistance by Sartre and deBeauvoir, I was identifying with freedom fighters resisting the fascist invaders. In childhood, identity was with the Indians resisting the genocide by white man bearing superior technology, the Colt .45 and new diseases. Theretofore, my life had been ruled by expectations of others. Upon release from the Navy, I would begin same day the life of living by my own expectations, all obligations in the past. From that day onward I lived by my own obligations. Had jobs, of course, but they allowed me my own mind, would not have one that didn't. A momentum of learning was begun that carried into the education years and beyond unto the present and beyond. It was philosophical learning I sought, though in my case I wanted living philosophy, not analyzing the paragraphs of Plato. Reading philosophy I look for the practical understanding as it expresses in everyday life, the playing field where we live our lives. So long ago I have no recollection where it came from I read someone say of philosopher Hegel that his philosophy was a mansion and he lived in a shed out back. I wanted whatever philosophy I lived by to be the house I live in, be it big or small. I went with small. My home is the Air Bellows schoolhouse. It's where my parachute landed me.

 

may apples

 

The Charleston years were the learning years, another transition time, a decade of finding out what my interests were and following them. My self-education leaned more and more toward the spiritual, generated by interest in reading 20th Century American poetry, and in translation, French and Chinese, and prose writers of the world. The American writers of the 20th Century were very much my guides, something like taking a deer path through the woods, flow with it, go with its own direction and see where it leads. I came to a place of wanting to let go of looking consciously for my own direction, made the decision one Tuesday at lunch in Frieda's Café to give over to chance, allow chance, see where it goes. I started feeling like a consciousness was directing what was happening in my day to day experience for a few weeks. Feeling at a turning point, I didn't know which way to turn, what the choices were. I let chance have it. Came to a place I felt I needed to step out of my life for at least a few days. Was thinking about taking a bus to a small town I'd never heard of, rent a room in a motel for a few days and nights, stay in the room, eat at a diner, and come to terms with a feeling of stasis in my self. I was visiting with my friend Ann one weekend afternoon when a guy came by to pick up a kitten. Her cat had babies and she was giving them out to their new homes. I have no recollection how we got on the subject, I came to telling of my need to get away for a few days to be alone with no distractions. He mentioned a spiritual retreat between Myrtle Beach and North Myrtle Beach, 500 acres of virgin forest on the beach. It was only $3 a night. It was a retreat for the lovers of Meher Baba. I told him I wasn't interested in gurus. He said it didn't matter, I'd have a space to myself, no programs, no yoga classes, free to roam. Two days of picking up a paperback of Meher Baba's discourses that was laying about in a communal area, opening it randomly, open to chance for my guide at the time, I read the first paragraph on the page my eye fell upon. For hours, both days, I did this. Every time I opened the book I was given a direct answer to one of my big questions, every time. In this way, Meher Baba answered all my big questions in two days. What else could I say but, That was good.  

 

jack in the pulpit

 

For the first time in my life I saw that God indeed is. It was the religion I turned my back to, not God. I found in those two days I had not thrown Jesus out with the Fundamentalist religion as I thought I had. He had continued within as my most inner authority. I did not see that coming. All the years of believing I was an atheist I was fooling myself. I was shedding all that was false from what was real. It blued my circuits electric blue. Major surprise. I felt like a fish swimming in a lake, sees a plump bug, gobbles it down and it has a hook in it, the hook pulls me to the shore as is said in the old hymn. From then on I could not live as if I didn't know God is. My direction had made a 180 degree turn in three days. from outward to inward. I spent the next year reading Meher Baba's discourses, biographies, memoirs by ones from his inner circle. In that time an opportunity opened up to take a job caretaking a farm of 23 head of cows and Christmas trees and live in the house my life had aimed me toward. Came to the mountains to study, to learn, to become one with the earth around me, under my feet, learn the ways of the ones that can't talk as we do, the crows, dogs, cows, trees. The fly walking on the glass, the crow walking in the meadow. They are conscious as I am. We have different levels of consciousness. I live in a world where everything is conscious, the ferns opening up, the wild violets blooming, the bird on the rhododendron branch, the rhododendron. And then I rediscovered Henry Miller, found he had the same spiritual understanding I had, found him all the more interesting. Years later, I wanted to make myself write every day, anything, a journal where anything goes as long as it's decent. Five years of writing every day, I open and start reading Colossus of Maroussi and a flood of memory takes me to seeing how much I live in the world around me like Henry Miller. Then I start seeing I write like him. Long paragraphs. I'd forgotten he wrote in long paragraphs. First person experience, making everyday life experience important. I've been seeing this week that Henry Miller's art form became a subconscious model for my life and writing. I dare not compare or contrast myself with Henry Miller's writing, his is so beautiful and mine is so plain, he gets down into the soul and I maybe get as close as a peep through a keyhole. It's OK. I'm not competing, just putting down the flow of my thoughts, seeing subjective experience the closest we can get in writing to what we call reality, where the spiritual world and the physical world are one.

 

 

quan yin on cloud mountain

 

 

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